THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507080595
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
FORD MADOX FORD wrote it in the title of a novel after World War I: No More Parades. We marched off to World War II with no less purpose but greater misgiving about what it all meant. Twenty years after the end of that, Vietnam took us away on buses and returned us again in body bags and awkward group therapy at underfunded VA hospitals.
Desert Storm, the video crusade, had more than a little celebratory savor, but by then ``post-traumatic stress disorder'' had become American household words.
Leave it to a former secretary of defense - Robert McNamara, the man with the stay-pressed hair - to put the last lid on glory, long after the fact. The old still send the young to war. Now some seem to have a capacity for regret.
Vietnam vet John A. Miller, 49, a North Carolina native late of the 82nd Airborne and Hartford Insurance Co., has written a remarkable book concerning the implications and consequences of modern soldiering. It is not a coming-of-age book about trial by fire. It is emphatically not a collection of war stories.
Jackson Street and Other Soldier Stories (Orloff Press, $18.95, 169 pp.) is rather an intense series of tales told stateside, after the fact of military service. Combat is alluded to, but only remotely. The real losing battles for the characters Miller puts on the page are conflicts of sensibilities amputated in the field; the stump aches where the limb once was.
Jackson Street is Miller's after-action report.
In ``Gus,'' terminally ailing Henry Teeter goes to Venice Beach to die after 28 years in the Army. Old barriers break down. Alone after a life spent in the barracks, he grows a ponytail and tolerates the presence of a homeless youth with a blasted brain:
``Contemptuous of long-haired hippies and anyone with a non-regulation approach to life when he'd had the big guns, Henry had lately discovered that the maintenance of expectations was simply too taxing.''
These stories deal with the results of absent fathers and suddenly enlisted sons, Southern poor for whom the armed services promised a way out of the life their parents struggled to survive, AWOLs, suicides, alcoholics and the baffled women they teamed up with, if only for a time.
In ``Blackstone,'' after the Virginia town ``so poor it had no stone memorial honoring its Confederate war dead,'' a young woman checks into a motel with her old father and 8-year-old son. The father is bound for the Baptist Home. The son is left to his own devices.
The owner of the tourist court takes the boy, Danny, briefly under his wing. Dad's missing. Ultimately, Mom's no-account boyfriend will be, too, arrested for car theft, a runaway from duty at Fort Lee.
As things unfold, everybody ends up alone.
The overwhelming impression is a bittersweet wistfulness for the family that might have been.
``Spanky's Dead'' is a wry record of barracks talk, desperate, digressive and dumb. ``The Ice Machine'' recounts the loss of a sad court-martial candidate at the Presidio stockade. ``Vancouver'' chronicles a drug deal gone sour.
Dead ends.
The title character in ``Kenny'' hears voices.
``It's the boys,'' he tells Billy the narrator, who had been with him in basic, AIT and jump school, then Vietnam. ``The boys from the squad. The ones that was killed. They talk to me from time to time.''
Kenny kills himself with a shotgun.
``After he died,'' confides his friend, ``I worried for the longest time that maybe Kenny or some of the other guys might start talking to me, like they did him. I laid awake to all hours of the night, listening, but I never heard a thing.''
He does, though. Billy recounts his conversations with Kenny. And John A. Miller makes us hear them both, representatives of a botched generation, walking wounded saying precisely the same thing.
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB