A Search For Peace

A SEARCH FOR PEACE
By Vivian McInerny
The Oregonian

Source: THE OREGONIAN
Monday, November 10, 2003
Edition: SUNRISE, Section: LIVING, Page D01

Summary: For the sister of a slain Vietnam soldier, grieving never ends, but a message brings a healing response

The phone rang one Saturday morning. My daughter was watching cartoons, so I took the cordless into the hall. A man introduced himself. I expected him to launch into a rote sales pitch for a new long-distance service or credit card company, but the voice on the other end paused, as though awaiting recognition.

”Denny McCarty,” he repeated.

The name still meant nothing to me.

”I knew your brother,” he said.

They were bunkmates. They trained together. They went to Vietnam together.

They came home separately.

Unable to think of any useful words, I nodded, and in that stretched moment of silence between us became keenly aware of the colored shadows of cartoons casting random patterns across the bare, white walls.

My brother Roger James McInerny was killed in Vietnam on April 1, 1970. He was 19, the oldest of six kids in a lively, noisy Irish Catholic family in Minneapolis. That was the day when things once familiar felt strange, when previously important things became trivial, when the sum total of everything I knew about the world equaled absolutely nothing at all. I was 13.

Today in Iraq, the weapons are different, but the emotional shrapnel is the same. Hundreds of families have suffered the shock of losing a loved one and, for them, the task of grieving has just begun. It never ends.

Sorrow is a strange emotion. Some people describe it as pain. Others describe it as numbing. Sometimes I feel it is the purgatory of ricocheting between those two extremes, caught in a quiet chaos.

For a 13-year-old in 1970, sorrow was also mixed up in the chaos of the times. The war that took my brother was ripping apart the United States. Generations were separated, not just by age but also by perspective. The traditions of parents seemed hollow to their kids. The revolution of kids seemed pointless to their parents. I was old enough to question the ways of the world but too young to do anything about them. So I mostly sat, dazed, in front of a flickering television screen, taking in the phony sets and canned laughter of “Gilligan’s Island” and the real footage of soldiers crying on the news. Both seemed worlds away.

My brother’s room in the basement, untouched since his death, became my refuge. I would retreat downstairs and play his Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix tapes full blast.

I wish I could say my brother’s death spurred me to become a political activist or a community volunteer. Instead, I spent five years on a path of rebellious self-destruction and three more bumming around the globe until I found some peace, and a livelihood, in Portland.

It was easy, in the business of everyday life, to push aside sorrow. You never forget. It’s there. But instead of drowning in it, you learn to stay afloat.

In spring 2000, I began surfing the Web for information on Vietnam. I wanted to write a newspaper story. At least, that’s what I told myself.

I reread my brother’s letters to get the names of companies, units and platoons. I was convinced no one would remember Roger—my brother was in Vietnam less than a month when he was killed—but I wanted to gain some understanding of what it was like for him there. I posted a single message, hoping to communicate with anyone who had served near the Cambodian border around the same time as my brother.

I felt as if I were tossing a bottled message into a vast cyber sea.

More than two years later, Denny McCarty found it.

He signed on to the Internet for the first time at his home in Elgin, Minn., and almost immediately came across my note. The e-mail address I’d left was no longer valid. McCarty, however, managed to get my phone number and was itching to dial, but it was still early morning in Minnesota and two hours earlier on the West Coast.

”I’ve been sitting here waiting for it to be 9 o’clock in Oregon so I could call,” McCarty said when he finally phoned. “I figure I’ve been waiting 30 years for this.”

He and my brother met in training in Alabama, two Minnesota boys looking for someone familiar. My brother was killed in the first, and only, heavy action their company encountered.

”I spent 12 months in the field and never saw anything like that first battle again,” McCarty said. “We lost 50-something guys that night. Out of the 16 guys Roger and I went in with, only three came home.” McCarty returned to the United States one year later and a lifetime older.

”I was a basket case,” he said.

He got a job in a John Deere factory. He married, had a couple of kids, got divorced. He never talked about Vietnam.

”But most nights I woke up screaming Roger’s name,” he said.

McCarty never attended a veterans group. He didn’t go to therapy. He didn’t join a 12-step program. But about 15 years ago, he met with another Vietnam veteran in town for coffee. They talked. They felt better. They talked some more. They’ve been meeting weekly ever since.

”But some things you only need to say once,” McCarty said.

Whenever McCarty visited the Twin Cities, he’d search the Minneapolis phone books to find Roger’s parents, relieved each time he failed.

”I didn’t know if they’d want to talk to me,” he said. “I didn’t know what I’d say.” Years slipped by, and McCarty began to think maybe too much time had passed. No one would remember Roger. No one would be left to care. He was both relieved and nervous to learn otherwise.

”This is something I should have done years ago,” he said.

I didn’t tell most of my family about McCarty. Earlier this year, I flew to Minneapolis but said nothing of my plans to meet him later that week. I knew they would ask why, and I didn’t have a clear answer. A friend suggested that maybe I hoped to get to know my brother through McCarty’s reminiscing. But I had my own memories.

He was the brother who taught me how to skip stones on the Mississippi River. He showed me how to throw a football when the trees in the front yard glowed brilliant yellow in the autumn sun. Once, when I cried because I’d broken a favorite kaleidoscope, my brother took it apart to show me how pieces of colored glass and mirrors made the mysterious patterns. I carried those bits of stained glass around until I lost them through a hole in my pocket, leaving a trail of rainbow colors behind me.

Each member of my family has dealt, or not dealt, with Roger’s death in his or her own way, choosing the memories carefully.

In the wisdom and arrogance of my middle years, I thought that I had finished grieving. I reasoned that time had long ago sutured the gaping wound left by my brother’s death.

Yet, some 30-odd years later, there was still something that provoked me to seek out McCarty.

On a drive through southern Minnesota, the land stretches flat as far as the eye can see. The lines on the highway roll beneath the car at a hypnotic pace. What should have been a relaxing car ride had me in a silent panic.

McCarty and I had talked several times by phone. We’d exchanged e-mails. But I started worrying that I hadn’t checked out the details enough. What if he was some crazed vet living in a tent in the woods? What if his home was a half-buried bus filled with war memorabilia?

I turned on the radio. The talk was about the price of cattle and wheat. I looked at the directions McCarty had given: “Drive about five miles to the three-mile mark.” It wasn’t too late to make a U-turn. But I didn’t. Eventually, I came to a quiet cul-de-sac with several modest homes surrounded by woodlands.

McCarty met me at the front door and introduced me to his wife. She left us alone to talk. We pulled chairs up to the kitchen table.

”What do you want to know?” he asked.

”I’m not sure,” I said nervously. This is not the way reporters typically begin interviews, but I was being honest.

McCarty told me the story he had told already on the phone.

”We were guarding a fire base about the size of two football fields,” he began.

It was nothing but dirt and dust and ammunition. About 125 young soldiers waited, tense and edgy all day and into the starless night. At 1 a.m., the firing started. Bullets and bombs stirred a choking cloud of dust.

”You couldn’t see two feet in front of you,” McCarty said.

The fighting lasted until dawn, when U.S. planes flew over and bombed what remained. As the sun rose on a new day, more than half the guys were gone: Fifty or more were dead; another 30 or so were injured and air-lifted out. The rest were left trying to make sense of what had happened.

McCarty sought out his five friends. He found two alive.

”I unzipped 35 body bags looking for your brother,” McCarty said, his voice breaking. “I never found him.”

My brother was missing in action for one day. McCarty was being treated for his own injuries when they found Roger and shipped him home.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. McInerny,

I extend my most profound sympathy to you on the recent loss of your son, Private First Class Roger J. McInerny Jr. who died in the service of his country on April 1, 1970. On the morning of April 1, Roger and his Company were securing Fire Support Base Illingworth in the vicinity of Tay Ninh, Republic of Vietnam, when Roger was mortally wounded at approximately 4:30 A.M. It may afford you some comfort to know that death came quickly and he was not subject to any unnecessary suffering.

Respectfully,

George K. Hobson
CPT, Infantry
Commanding Officer

Some people told us we should feel angry at the government for sending him to war. Everyone said that, with time, we would get over it, as though grief were a bump in the road. But the loss of my brother was more like a forced detour on a family drive, a winding, rugged road through strange territories that led everywhere but home.

There are thousands of families going through the same thing now in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan—all over the world. When the battles, bombs and terrorist acts are forgotten and their reasons for being—right, wrong or misguided—have faded from popular memory, the rippling effects continue, not for a while, but forever. Maybe 30 years down the road you hang on to your kids a little longer than you might have otherwise. Maybe your kids’ kids will tell the story of their great-uncle who left a hole in the heart of their family.

I worried that wanting to meet McCarty fed a morbid curiosity, that I might be wallowing in past sadness, stirring up forgotten feelings and subjecting my family and myself to “unnecessary suffering.” I worried that I was courting chaos.

But sitting at his kitchen table, listening to the stories of a tough young soldier who became a good man, a man my brother never had a chance to be, I knew this was the right thing to do. I felt as if I were reassembling that broken kaleidoscope of my childhood. Fragmented bits of life, like pieces of colored glass, make no sense without reflection. Reflection allows us to see the ever-changing patterns, slightly different with every turn.

I sought out McCarty without an idea of what I wanted. But when I asked him what he hoped to get out of our meeting, he was clear.

”I want you to know that your brother was not alone. He had friends,” McCarty said. “I want you to know that I think about him every day. I think about them all.”