Carry
Me Home is now available in all e-book formats. This is the third
story of Del Vecchio’s Southeast Asia trilogy which began with
On
Dreams and Returning (from pgs 74-75)
Dreams. I still have em. Old ones. Almost like friends
now. And new ones. I don’t even think of em as havin begun at Dai Do, but
that’s where the shrinks tried to put it. I think they’re wrong. I subscribe to
Wapinski’s theory, kind of a Grunt’s Theory of Psychoanalysis. Yeah, for me,
Dai Do was there. Yeah, it was traumatic. But it’s like blaming a blown engine
on the thing being made instead of on overrevving the sucker. Or maybe more
like blaming a crop failure on lack of rainfall in August—but when irrigation
is available. Get it? There’s a cause there but it’s not The Cause. Not for me.
Like a chemical reaction where the potential for disaster exists in the test
tube—but so does the potential for something really good. And it depends on the
next ingredient that’s dumped in—not only on what’s there. Shrink said Dai Do
was it. Bobby said it was what came later. “The initial traumas may have been
traumatic,” he said, “but fact is you handled it then and you could have
handled it forever if circumstances had been different. If somebody or
something didn’t mess it all up.” One of the guys, this was later but I liked
the way he put it, he said, “Your dreams, you know, many times they’re true.
They’re right on target. Even when your life is a bucket of shit.”
Granpa Wapinski’s Code (from pgs 179-181)
Each day from the moment it
was acknowledged Bobby would move, Pewel gave him something. At one dinner
Pewel handed Bobby an envelope with one hundred twenty-dollar bills. “I can’t
take this,” Bobby said.
“Yes you can,” Pewel countered.
“No Granpa. It’s not right.”
“It’s seed money,” Pewel said. “I can do it and I want
to do it.”
“I can’t do it,” Bobby said. “If I ever need it, I’ll
ask you for it. Okay?”
“There’s a card in there. It’s something I remember
from my father. The words mighta changed but the meaning’s the same. He said it
was the oldest prayer of the Old Testament. Maybe older than Judaism itself.
Keep God in your life Bob. Someplace. Not necessarily like they teach at St.
Ignatius’, but someplace.”
“I think He’s in the land,” Bobby said.
Pewel Wapinski nodded. Then quietly he said, “Dear
Lord, please bless us and watch over us; deliver us from evil; forgive us our
trespasses; and give us the strength and guts to try hard and never give up.”
He paused again. “That’s for your sons.”
“Sons! Granpa, I don’t have—”
“That’s for your sons when you have sons.”
Every day Pewel Wapinski gave his grandson something
more, and every evening Bobby Wapinski packed the items in his footlocker.
Still what grandfather wished to give to grandson was not physical or financial
but spiritual—words, ideas, ideals that to the old man were poignant.
“Civilized people … civilization, Bob, this is a gift of God or of
circumstance, and of five hundred generations that have gone before us. You’ve
got the ability to control, to some extent, today’s circumstances. That’s a
responsibility. Try hard. Never give up!”
“Granpa, I never knew you were such a philosopher!”
Pewel chuckled. “Only on midwinter nights like this
when there’s not so much to do around here.” The old man lay back in his
overstuffed chair in the dimly lit, dingy living room. “Take these with you,
Bob,” he said. He did not move. Inside, dimly, he was thinking about his
daughter-in-law, thinking vaguely, She drove my son away and now she’s driving
away my grandson.
“What?” Bobby asked.
“These words,” Pewel said. His eyes were closed.
“Integrity. These words are principles. Virtue. Pride. Confidence.
Responsibility. A man must live not by expedience, not by quick gratification,
but by principles. Liberty. Independence. Freedom. Faith. Family. Courage.”
A Grunt Can Cope (from Tony’s narration - pg 371)
A GRUNT CAN COPE with monsoons, with
leeches, with searing heat, suffocating humidity. The savagery of war does not
strip him of his humanity. These things are external. They are not of the self.
One does not say, “I am the pain of leeches.” One does not say, “I am a firefight.”
“I am Manny’s death.” “I am an atrocity.” It requires a return to a civilized
World to complete that dehumanization.
This became Bobby’s theory of the self. As you witness
our destruction, you should have our criteria for evaluation. It was maybe six
years ago that Bobby said, “In finding one’s self one loses one’s self and no
longer needs to define one’s self because one simply is. That is the true self.
When one no longer needs to define one’s self in terms of possessions, actions,
or relationships, the self falls away, opening one up to actions and
relationships. Losing one’s self frees one to do, to observe, to be observed,
to interact without the constraints of looking at one’s self through others’
eyes, or even one’s own. Praise and criticism, real or imagined, block one from
developing a value system based on criteria beyond the immediate, beyond the
past, beyond projected opinions, polls, the people’s will, election results,
resale values, net-net-net and myriad other less-than-ultimate criteria. Our
problem is searching for ultimate criteria; interpreting actions and thoughts
against those criteria; establishing a guide, a code, an ethic, that reflects
those criteria.”
It was not new, but to him, to us, it seemed like
something lost. It had been lost to “our people,” lost to our country; and our
people and country were floating, a rudderless ship—the rudder voluntarily
destroyed or purposefully disconnected in the name of criteria driven by the
three great temptations: greed, lust, and power; insidious, manipulative forces
like unseen toxins coursing through the system tripping, cutting, causing us to
lose our way, to lose opportunities, to feel guilty for what might have been.
Available at www.The13thValley.com via Amazon,
Warriors Publishing Group and Open Road Integrated Media.
