Bellaire, Texas, 1968
“Come on, Mac. Put your gear in your bag and we’ll drive you over there. His family knows you’re coming and they’re waiting.”
Even though shot in the ass last year, Ron still played Boy Scout with what passed for joie de vivre in Texas. Jimmie smiled his big country-boy smile, content in his traditional role as Sidekick. They scouted the hotel room for my clothing and personal items. Soon a small pile grew on the top of the bed.
“Grab his bag, Jimmie. It’s in the closet.”
I still wasn’t ready after a long train ride across the Southwest. I needed time; time to figure out what I was going to say to Mike’s folks. Instead of going directly to their home, I had rented a room in a downtown hotel and called some Marine Corps pals in Houston.
While I was a combat Marine, multilingual world traveler and held a Ph.D. in charming nonsense, I was terrified. Somewhere between fulfilling a promise to the parents of a deceased friend and my talent for high drama, I was about to navigate new territory without a compass or map.
“OK, Ron. I’ll go, but I need a drink.” Both Texans smiled.
The three of us had studied and drank our way through the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. We stumbled through the Vietnamese program and somehow wound up together in the same battalion in ’Nam.
Now here we were a year after our tours, in our prime, full of hormones in Houston, Texas, and heading for the hotel bar. Eleven-thousand miles from Vietnam and in civilian clothes, we entered the elevator on yet another mission.
By midnight, liquid courage flowed through me and I recited a poem by Ferlinghetti, annoying every Catholic in hearing distance. Something about, “Jesus, Being all hung up….”
Ron had heard it all before. “OK, Mac, enough. Jimmie and I have to work tomorrow. Your bag is in the car. Let’s go.”
In the back seat I watched skyscrapers dissolve into suburbia as we turned off the boulevard onto a residential street. Ron stopped his Valiant and turned the engine off. “Here it is. The lights are still on so just go on up and knock on the door.”
I leaned forward between the two of them. “Aren’t you coming in with me?”
Jimmie shook his head. “Damn it, Mac. They ain’t the Viet Cong you know. Now man up and go do it.”
As I walked up the path to the house, Ron and Jimmie watched to make sure I did my duty and that someone answered the door.
I dropped my bag on the porch, stared at a little white button and after a minute, pushed it. Four notes belled softly inside, chairs scraped, voices, footsteps. The doorknob turned. My heart drummed loudly and I stood like a frozen statue under the porch light. The door swung open.
“Mac!”
And there they were, Mike’s parents, just as I imagined. They hugged, kissed, and dragged me inside. My anxiety dissolved in a frontal assault of love and celebration. I turned around to see Ron and Jimmie nodding and smiling. The Valiant pulled away from the curb. Mission accomplished.
A year of correspondence with Mike’s mother sketched a family portrait of wholesome Americana devastated by the loss of their beloved elder son. Now, a little overdue perhaps, a friend had traveled to their home to help replace a two-year-old, yellowing telegram.
In the following week I lived an entire lifetime. Mike’s dad and I stayed up nights until neighborhood dogs barked at the paperboy in the morning. As a survivor of the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, he and I found common ground and language.
Loquacious, capable, and dynamic, Mrs. Driscoll played tour guide as we attended church, visited Mike’s high school, turned the pages of family albums, and then, one day, we stood before her son’s grave.
“Do you like his epitaph, Mac?”
I read the carving on the tombstone. “Corporal Victor Michael Driscoll, 1945-1967, USMC, Vietnam.”
“Yes. It’s fine.”
But Mike was not a typical Marine. Sensitive, articulate, and kind, he seemed miscast in the violence of combat. He carried an aura of fatalism and those of us with many months of experience sensed that he would not survive.
I slept in his old room and was encouraged to make it my own. Inside an old wooden trunk, I found a huge stack of notebooks filled with poetry written by Mike, and I read it all. Romantic, idealistic, he wrote some on the theme of dying bravely and young. Then I understood: a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps he got what he wanted.
Ron fixed me up with a great gal, Jimmie gave me his old car, a friend of Mr. Driscoll offered me a job and my friendship with Mike’s fourteen-year-old brother flourished and deepened. Bellaire Texas gave the homecoming I never received in my own community. Everything was great. It was all so wonderful and terrifying.
I soon began to feel I might become a replacement for Mike. It was time to go.
The Driscolls understood. They hugged me and agreed that everything had happened too fast and I needed to leave and “find myself.” As she poured more coffee, Mrs. Driscoll smiled at her son’s athletic awards mounted on the family room wall.
The back door popped open and Mike’s brother tossed his baseball mitt on top of the TV. “What’s up?”
Mrs. Driscoll held my gaze and nodded.
What could I possibly say? So I asked, “How was practice? Let’s go talk in the bedroom.”
For a week he had been happy to talk of grown-up stuff and share secrets his parents might have found uncomfortable. He had lost his big brother and now I was about to leave.
In Mike’s room we stood in front of the window and stared out at the backyard where two brothers wrestled, played catch, told secrets, and planned their futures. I looked down at him and confessed, “It’s time for me to leave. I thought I was coming to help you guys and I’m the one who got all the good stuff.”
He looked back outside at the rusty swing set. “You are my brother now.”
Oh no. The last thing I wanted to happen. Would he follow Mike and I, enlist and come home lost and confused or not at all? I struggled. He felt my hesitation.
His hand felt warm on my arm and like an older brother he looked at me and said, “It’s OK, Mac. I love you.” His hand fell away. “But I don’t wanna be like you.”
That night the Greyhound Bus agent sold me a ticket to Bloomington, Indiana. L.T. Brown from our infantry training regiment said he had a bedroom for rent and a job at the pizza parlor in town. ◆
This piece is excerpted from the Winter 2024-2025 issue of Parabola, GRIEF & GRATITUDE. You can find the full issue on our online store.