The Vietnam war was about over when I was coming of age, and I still had my MIA bracelet glued to my wrist in hopeful anticipation of getting news from the mystery man incised in chrome: Captain Stephen Hanson, missing 6-3-67. I’ve saved it and shown it to my Italian friends over here as a sad reminder of that war, which always seems to lead us to discussions regarding the unbelievable horrors still going on in other parts of the world, one just a jet's hop away from here. You’d think heads of states would have learned their lessons regarding military force, the destruction and suffering wars can bring, but it seems we’re still stuck in that old world mentality that wars must go on and that humans are programmed to destroy other humans.
Living most of my time here I’m labeled an “expat”, a word I’ve gotten to deplore because of the many facets attached to it. But I didn’t leave my country because I didn’t love it - I am still an American and love my homeland. I’m thinking of the many young men who fled the U.S. during the Vietnam era’s mandatory draft, and in my mind the ones that made it back alive may still be wandering expats, like Captain Stephen Hanson on my bracelet.
Pa didn’t trust what was behind that MIA bracelet when it arrived in the mail back then. He was convinced that someone was making an awful lot of money with a teenage fad by immorally using the names of those poor soldiers – whether those names were real or made up. He also wanted me to be careful with every dime spent with my savings, just like he and Ma had done when they immigrated to America from war-town Italy. Pa eventually saved up and bought a little trailer park in Small-town, Michigan, that gradually became a good source of income because he did most of the work himself. But when he needed help with the heavier jobs, he’d hire Vets to help him out, mostly because the opportunities the government had promised them never seemed to show up.
An old neighbor kept telling him “you hire a vet and you hire trouble”. But because Pa fought in Italy in WWII, he had a realistic sense of what the boys had seen: after thirty years, he would still have nightmares of the sound of bombs and continually see his troops’ faces blown up on the Sicilian coast line.
I wanted to get to know the veterans living in the trailer park who made it back from Vietnam - in a way they put a face on the man on my bracelet. I considered them like big brothers and couldn’t shake that heavy sorrow I had for them. They all seemed to have left something behind - visible or invisible - in that far-away place we’d see on the evening news. One Vet left his legs there, but when he got back he made himself a three legged bike with snow tires so he could wheel it with his hands all the way downtown. Other G.I.s in the park seemed strong but unkempt, their youth wiped out of them and left to deteriorate along with their friends in “Nam”. Pa seemed to have patience with i poveri ragazzi, those poor boys, and put up with their odd ways. For the most part he put up with George.
George lived in one of the abandoned trailers Pa had fixed up, so he let him stay there in exchange to do some of the heavier jobs. I was right at the age when George no longer felt like a big-brother but more like the perfect American soldier: handsome, blonde, blue-eyed, soft-spoken - the image Ma had told me about when the Americans came through her town in Southern Italy to save them from the Germans. George was somewhat well-kept for a Vet, and mostly stayed quietly in his trailer until Pa would knock on his door and ask him to come outside and help him with a chore. I watched George’s muscles flex as he helped haul heavy pipes or hammer on a repair job, always with a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth while I watched and waited for a quick wink he’d throw at me.
Sometimes George would get a vacant look in his eyes and got to doing little things that the neighbors would complain about to Pa - like pee in public, scream in sudden fits of rage, kick a car that would come too close to him, blink his flashlight in the neighbor’s windows, things like that. Pa tried to justify George’s behavior, but the neighbors wouldn’t understand and there was no way they wanted him there in the park.
George disappeared one day. He left his trailer and never came back. No one knew where he went, if he had family, or friends. We just know he left the trailer and everything he had in it. He didn't own a car, so Pa couldn't even fathom where he went other than the near-by grocery store.
His trailer wreaked abandonment of life all around. The entire kitchen table was covered with cigarette butts, stacked and balanced, mixed with black and white Polaroids of people we didn't know. The bedroom had his clothes draped on every protruding angle possible, and the sheets and pillowcases showed a gray outline where he had slept. In the middle of the small living space he had piled his Vietnam fatigues, tons of green pants, green jackets, green T-shirts, green belts and hats, tons of stuff that my brother and I used and distributed to our friends.
The strangest thing I remember in that trailer were the ants – lines of them neatly squished against the wall in the kitchen, with tallying in pencil underneath them. Some were rolled up, some were completely flat, some were in pieces with their legs separated from their bodies, or just one little round piece counted as half. Some were just a spot on the wall, maybe where they had dried up and fallen off. In any case they were all lined up, one next to the other, and George had taken the count underneath. Who knows, maybe George is wandering somewhere near-by watching spring poppies color these hills red.
[A portion of this post is translated into English from my Italian novel, La Cena del Tacchino]
Robert!
Fine writer and reader of Substack—we are starting a movement to get a poetry section added to the platform. Can I ask, are you with us?
https://substack.com/profile/10309929-david/note/c-15579327
If so, please consider clicking the above link and liking the Notes post—leave a comment or even share within your own community. Poetry lives on in the minds of hearts of writers, it breathes on the page.
Your voice can be heard among the starry illuminations, howling at the moon.
Thank you for your time and support.
Love and appreciation,
David