The Ohana Part 29

Steve was already undressed and running into the water. Susan hesitated, then pulled off her clothes and joined them. They splashed and played until they were exhausted. Then they crawled out onto the cool white sand. They sat enjoying the sound of the surf. The trade winds made goose pimples on their damp bodies. Susan pulled a towel over her even though their att.i.tude toward each other was curiously s.e.xless, yet intimate. No one felt embarra.s.sed.

Steve leaned back on his elbows and gazed at the crescent moon. "I love both of you."

No one embarra.s.sed him by commenting.

Susan thought it was the most perfect moment in her life.

Chapter Thirty-nine.

Vietnam: March 16, 1968 Steve lay on his belly and peered through the heavy brush, his rifle c.o.c.ked and ready. Someone once said war was h.e.l.l. He should have listened. What a way to learn how trying to do the right thing could end up being the biggest mistake in his life. It could even get him killed. But the worst part of it was he was now officially a killer.

The 11th Brigade-Charlie Company-had suffered heavy casualties during the Tet Offensive. Everyone was angry and discouraged. A stranger had died in Steve's arms. The blood and gore was mind-numbing. His emotions crawled into a part of his brain that kept his mind safe from the madness.

Bob the Butcher patrolled one of the villages with him two weeks ago and he had seen first-hand how he got the name. Trigger-happy Bob wore his victim's ears around his neck. As they cut through the jungle side by side, the brush crackled to the right of them. Steve saw a flash of blue dart through the trees. It was a small boy.

Without hesitation, Bob raised his rifle and shot the child.

Shocked, Steve swore. "He was just a kid!"

Bob put down his rifle. "He was Cong."

"You don't know that," Steve cried out in frustration.

"One of my buddies was killed by a young boy who threw a grenade at him. There are no boys out here. Only Cong." Bob walked over to the body, his rifle slung on his shoulder. He kicked the boy over with his foot.

Steve was horrified. The boy looked no more than ten-years old.

Bob leaned down and cut off the boy's ears.

Steve hung his head and refused to talk to Bob all the way back to camp.

The next day Steve saw Bob sitting with some of his buddies showing off his gory new acquisition while smoking pot laced with heroin. Ted, a kid from Milwaukee, noticed Steve and nudged Bob. Everyone in the group turned and stared. Someone said something Steven couldn't hear and everyone laughed. Walking away from the sound of derision, Steve asked to be taken off all patrols with Bob. His request was granted.

"If it had been a girl, she would've been raped first," Jerry from Indiana said. "I saw Bob and some of his buddies rape a girl who was maybe twelve-years old before they killed her."

The story made Steve physically ill. "I feel like I'm stuck in a bad dream with a bunch of insane people. Tell me, what do you think the Butcher and the rest of his guys were like back home?"

"Who knows? Probably punks and bullies. I know they smoke pot mixed with heroin. So maybe they're just crazy." Jerry shook his head, "All I know is I shouldn't have flunked Science. Uncle Sam didn't wait for me to make it up."

Before Steve could reply, Lt. William Calley, their commanding officer, a college dropout like himself, walked up to him. "Come with me, Duffy. The village of My Lai is just ahead. We're going on a search and destroy mission."

Steve rose. "Have there been any reports of gunfire coming out of the village, sir?"

Lt. Calley didn't answer. Taking one last drag from his cigarette, he ground it out under his boot. With a sideways glance, he motioned for Steve to follow.

Steve saw his unit fanned along the countryside, moving in eerie silence in the sunlight, their rifles ready, their steel bayonets glinting. The Butcher was the point man. His cronies followed behind.

The villagers stopped their activities as soon as the Butcher and his unit stepped into the village. Butcher Bob turned his head. His bloodshot, gla.s.sy eyes met the lieutenant's. As Jerry said, Bob and his group were high most of the time. Steve saw Lt. Calley nod.

Even from the distance, Steve could see the whites of Bob's teeth gleaming against his sunburned skin when he smiled. Bob raised his left arm and sliced the air with his hand. With a whoop, Bob and his men began gunning down the villagers. People either fell or scattered. A slim young girl ran toward the rice paddies. Several soldiers bounded after her. Even from a distance, Steve could see them tearing off her clothes before raping and sodomizing her. He started toward them, but Lt. Calley put his hand out and stopped him. Steve's eyes were glued to the macabre scene. After the soldiers were done, they laughed and let the bleeding and naked girl run from them. One of the soldiers put a bullet in the screaming girl.

It was a scene from h.e.l.l.

Steve's heart pounded; tears filled his eyes. Why didn't Lt. Calley stop the slaughter? Instead, Lt. Calley motioned for him to keep moving. As they walked through the village, white-haired people fell to their knees, bowing to them with their heads touching the ground. Steve saw them bayoneted, shot, or clubbed right where they knelt. Hundreds of men, women, and little children were ma.s.sacred. He couldn't stop crying.

Steve's insides rumbled. He fought down his vomit when he saw soldiers tear the shirts from their victims and carve "C Company" on their chests with knives. The crazed weapons of destruction, his fellow soldiers, were taxi drivers, students, fathers, sons, and musicians back home. Caught up in the killing frenzy, their faces were etched in hatred, their eyes enflamed with madness, as they entered a place where humanity ceased to exist. The more blood spilled, the crazier they seemed to get. Some of them ran around grinning, their bayonets dripping with blood, their uniforms soaked a deep scarlet.

Bob cut off a villager's ears then beheaded him. Grinning maniacally, he placed his grisly trophy on a stake.

Lt. Calley halted in front of a group of villagers some of his men had rounded up. The Vietnamese dropped to their knees and wrung their hands. Hysterical women cried as their children clung to them.

"Shoot them," Lt. Calley ordered with dead calm.

"No sir, they're unarmed," Steve took a step backward. "For G.o.d's sake, Lieutenant, they're begging for their lives,"

"Are you disobeying a direct order, soldier?" Lt. Calley's jaw tightened. His soulless eyes fixed on the screaming crowd.

"Yes sir," Steve threw down his rifle.

"What about you, soldier?" Lt. Calley said to the soldier on the other side of him.

The soldier shrugged. "Whatever you say sir," the soldier jammed his rifle b.u.t.t into his shoulder and aimed. As if he thought better of it, he hesitated.

"Shoot them! That's an order," Lt. Calley and the soldier mowed down the villagers.

When the smoke cleared the air, bodies were piled haphazardly in numerous heaps. Lt. Calley and the other gunner walked through the bodies, shooting anyone who moved.

Steve picked up his rifle and ran. In the midst of the chaos, he saw other shocked soldiers fleeing the ma.s.sacre. He pa.s.sed a soldier on his knees, his face lifted to the sky. Tears streaked his grimy face and his hands were lifted, palms up, in supplication.

The soldier cried out, "Oh G.o.d, my G.o.d, forgive us for our sins."

The prayer tore at Steve's heart. He stopped and fell to his knees next to the soldier and asked the G.o.d he barely knew to stop the slaughter.

The next day, he wrote to Susan.

Chapter Forty.

Honolulu: 1968-1969 Susan received a confused, tear-stained letter with a graphic recounting of the horrors Steve experienced in a place called My Lai. After that, Susan stopped hearing from him. She wrote to him once a week but never heard back.

"Wars are created by old men and fought by young men," her Freudian Psychology professor said before he left on sabbatical to India. He had curly brown shoulder-length hair and a full beard. He lectured wearing Indian bedspread shirts, jeans, and sandals. Susan thought he looked stoned half the time. Like most of her professors, he was anti-war.

Susan was convinced the uncertainty of the war combined with the inevitability of the draft pushed many of her college students over the edge and into the blissful forgetfulness of drugs, s.e.x, rock n' roll. Sororities and fraternities were considered superfluous fluff. It was the Age of Aquarius and the time of stoners and protestors.

When President Johnson activated the National Guard on May of 1968, Susan joined the surging anti-war movement in Hawaii. According to the newspapers, studies showed more boys from the Islands had been killed or wounded percentage to population than any other state in the Union. Now the President, with the blessing of Hawaiian Senator and World War II war hero, Dan Inouye, decided to send troops comprised mostly of island boys to Vietnam.

Susan attended a rally on campus.

"It's happening again!" The militant factions of the anti-war movement shouted. "The brown people are being forced to fight America's war."

People all around Susan roared.

"Senator Inouye called us cowards!" A skinny j.a.panese student with granny gla.s.ses and hair down past his shoulders grabbed the microphone. Susan recognized him as the head of the radical left-wing SDS-Students for a Democratic Society. "What do you say, people?" He put his fist in the air.

Susan joined the crowd in pumping her fist up and down above her head and screaming, "h.e.l.l no, we won't go!"

Stirred up by the atrocities of My Lai portrayed in the press and in Steve's letter, Susan did an about-face on the issue of Vietnam.

"Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?" She yelled at draft card burning rallies and held up signs that read "Make love not war." She partic.i.p.ated in cla.s.sroom strikes protesting the ongoing war and attended Third World Liberation Front meetings where the only requirement not being white.

On June 6th, Bobby Kennedy was a.s.sa.s.sinated in California. It was the second a.s.sa.s.sination in 1968. On April 11th, Martin Luther King, the black preacher who fought for equality for people of every color, was murdered. Although she didn't know any black people, she felt their pain. It wasn't too long ago her family slaved in plantations for whites who considered them inferior.

All the good people were dying-King, the Kennedy's, and all the young men of her generation who were forced to go to war. In a way, her entire generation was dying. They were dying of disappointment. Her changing world view made her fire blaze even brighter until she sat in on a Third World meeting that doused her flame.

"The only thing this government understands is force!" The speaker was a heavyset Chinese girl wearing the typical uniform of radicals-long hair, granny gla.s.ses, no make-up, and a shapeless Indian bedspread caftan. She held a big cloth bag with a large applique of the peace sign. Love beads and a puka sh.e.l.l necklace encircled her thick neck.

The speaker leaned forward in the small, crowded room. "Let's burn the ROTC buildings."

The idea was so shocking it was met with silence at first. Then a dark-skinned brother of uncertain parentage spoke up. "It's about time someone in this movement took a stand."

A j.a.panese girl Susan recognized from her ethnic studies cla.s.s jumped up. "That's illegal."

Some of the crowd hooted.

The leader of the Third World Liberation Front, a slim, good-looking Filipino boy wearing a headband stood up and shouted, "America is fighting an illegal war!" He raised his fist in the air.

About a dozen people jumped up, punching the air with their fists, yelling their agreement.

The Chinese girl held up her hand. The room quieted. "We need to send them a strong message." She looked around the room. "America is killing the brown people. Most of the activated National Guardsmen on their way to 'Nam came from Hawaii."

"That's right," a girl wearing embroidered jeans and a muslin shirt stood. "I met a guy from Arizona who told me only three people from his state were activated."

"And how many came from Hawaii?" the Chinese girl asked.

"Hundreds," someone called out.

"More like thousands," an Asian man with his hair tied back in a ponytail suggested.

The Chinese girl rose from her seat. "I don't know about you, but I'm taking power back to the people."

As people leaped from their chairs, Susan slipped out of the room.

When Susan read the ROTC buildings at the University were burned down, realizing she didn't have what it took to be a revolutionary, she retired her radical hat forever. Violence and breaking the law, even if it could be called civil disobedience, wasn't in her nature.

Without a cause to fight for and having lost a part of her family when Jimmy and Steve left, she was aimless. She missed Jimmy's zest for living and his appreciation of life. Although they drifted apart after Steve left, they remained friends. Just before he left Hawaii following his graduation, she saw him one last time.

Jimmy had put on his uniform and paraded before her.

"Everyone is so serious and anti-war these days. I was born too late. Women don't swoon at the sight of a man in uniform."

Susan laughed. "You look very handsome. Just don't let spit get on your pretty face."

Jimmy made a face at her reference to anti-war demonstrators spitting on soldiers.

They made love one last time, for old time's sake. Jimmy nibbled her ear. "You know I love you, Sue."

Susan stroked his cheek. "And I'll always love you both. We're the Three Musketeers."

Jimmy kissed her. "Promise you'll write your best friend."

"Of course."

Chapter Forty-one.

Honolulu, 1970 The letter came in the mail one rainy afternoon when she least expected anything of importance. Set to graduate in June, she concentrated on her studies during her last semester. Later, she would look at it as a sign of things to come in what turned out to be a watershed year for the entire nation.

January 19, 1970 Dear Miss Han, I got your name and address from Jimmy's address book. I wasn't sure what kind of relationship you had with Jimmy, but I decided to write everyone whose name was written in his book.

Jimmy was shot down over Vietnam on December 28th. He was officially listed as Missing In Action. However, the military is pretty sure he's dead as his plane went down in flames. There isn't much more I can say.

Sincerely, Janet (Jimmy's mom) Susan threw herself on her bed and sobbed. She remembered what Steve had written. No matter what the recruiters said, everyone who enlisted was on a fast track to Vietnam.

Then on April 30, 1970, Susan watched President Nixon announce on TV the United States had invaded Cambodia. On May 4th, during a demonstration against the invasion at Kent State University, four students were killed and nine wounded by the Ohio National Guard who opened fire on the protestors. One student was permanently paralyzed.

Susan put down the paper in horror when she read about the Kent State debacle in the Honolulu Star Bulletin. On the front page was a picture of a female student on her knees next to a fallen comrade. The crumpled face of terror on the girl's face sent shock waves around the world. Rattled to the core, she left the house to score pot.