“I hope you don’t think I’m a hippie,” said the man to whom I was talking in the Crown Room of the Stardust Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada. “I’m just kind of, you know, growing this beard.” His name tag said Skip Skivington. He was probably in his early forties and he had been at Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division in 1944 and his voice was gentle and apologetic and I had not thought him a hippie.
It was the first evening of the 101st Airborne Association’s twenty-third annual reunion, one weekend in Las Vegas not long ago. Outside the late-summer sky burned all day and all night and inside it was perpetually cold and carpeted and no perceptible time of day or night, and here, in the Crown Room of the Stardust, along with a great many wives and a few children, were a couple of hundred survivors of Normandy, Bastogne, the Battle of the Bulge. I had come over from Los Angeles to find them and knew that I had found them when I walked into the Stardust bar and saw a couple of men in sport shirts and overseas caps. “Just wait a minute,” one of them had been saying. “I gotta finish this brew.” In the afternoon they had commandeered the Stardust swimming pool for a beer party, and now they were lining up for a buffet dinner (roast beef, ham, coleslaw, sliced beets, sliced tomatoes, American cheese, and dinner rolls), filling plates and finding tables and snapping the toy metal crickets that had been the 101st’s identification code on D-day. “General McAuliffe. General,” called a weathered man in an overseas cap as he threaded his way through the tables with a small child, two or three years old, by the hand. “Look at the boy. I wanted to show you the boy.”
Almost everyone else had found friends and a table by then, but Skip Skivington still stood with me. He was telling me about his son. His son, he said, had been missing in Vietnam since Mother’s Day. I did not know what to say, but because Skip Skivington was active in the 101st Airborne Association, I asked if his son had belonged to the 101st. The father looked at me and then away. “I talked him out of it,” he said finally. He reached into his coat pocket then and brought out a newspaper clipping, preserved in clear plastic, a story about his son: where he had gone to high school, the report that he was missing, the action in which he had last been seen. There was a snapshot of the boy, his face indistinct in the engraving dots, a blond eighteen-year-old sitting on a rock and smiling. I gave the clipping back to Skip Skivington, and before he put it in his pocket again he looked at it a long while, smoothed out an imagined crease, and studied the fragment of newsprint as if it held some answer.
The indistinct face of the boy and the distinct face of the father stayed in my mind all that evening, all that weekend, and perhaps it was their faces that made those few days in Las Vegas seem so charged with unspoken questions, ambiguities only dimly perceived. In most ways the reunion was a happy occasion. The wives had pretty dresses, and everyone liked Las Vegas, agreed that it was definitely the place for the reunion (“I’ve been to every reunion and I never saw so many guys as right here in Vegas, Vegas is definitely the place to have it”), agreed that the Stardust’s Lido Revue was—well, bare breasts are risqué, but the girls were just lovely and the whole thing was tastefully done, especially the ice-skating sequence, which was a work of art. There were meetings to be held, Gold Star Mothers, like Mrs. C. J. (Mom) Miller, to be recognized. There was a new president of the association to be installed. “Thanks, Bernie, fellow Screaming Eagles,” said the new president, “men of the 101st, our wives, our friends, our Gold Star Mothers…”
There was a wives’ luncheon, a hospitality suite. “I’ll be floatin’ around the hotel in the afternoon. I’m not gonna touch that hospitality suite till after two,” said someone to whom I was talking. There were Army movies, and I sat with a sprinkling of wives in the cool darkness and learned about the future of the Weapons Command, the function of Procurement. The wives slipped off their shoes and consulted slips of paper. “Not counting a couple of quarters at the airport,” one of them said, “we were down twenty-seven dollars yesterday and up twelve dollars today. That’s not bad, that’s net.” There were telegrams to be sent, to the 101st in Vietnam (“Keep that Eagle Screaming”), and telegrams to be read, from Hubert Humphrey (“We are not a nation that has lost its way, but a nation seeking a better way”). There was even a Teen Room, where a handful of children sat on folding chairs and regarded a Wurlitzer in sullen ennui.
And of course there were speeches. Maxwell Taylor came, to point out similarities between the Battle of the Bulge and the Tet Offensive. “By the way these things were reported, many of the people at home had the impression that we were losing the Bulge, just as they now have the impression that…” A colonel from Vietnam came, flown in to assure the guests that operations there were characterized by high esprit, rugged determination, that “the men in Vietnam are exactly like you were, and I was, twenty, twenty-five years ago.” Gen. Anthony McAuliffe came, the man who said “Nuts” when the Germans asked for a surrender at Bastogne, and he said that he would be with the group in Holland next year to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the European invasion. “We’ll visit our Dutch friends,” he said, “and revive memories of that great adventure we had there.”
And of course there it was, that was it. They had indeed had a great adventure, an essential adventure, and almost everyone in the room had been nineteen and twenty years old when they had it, and they had survived and come home and their wives had given birth to sons, and now those sons were nineteen, twenty, and perhaps it was not such a great adventure this time. Perhaps it was hard to bring quite the same urgency to holding a position in a Vietnamese village or two that they had brought to liberating Europe.
On the night of the speeches I sat with a man named Walter Davis and his wife, a soft-faced woman in a good black dress. Walter Davis jumped into Holland in 1944, and now he works for the Metropolitan Life in Lawndale, California, and has three children, a daughter of eighteen, a son of fourteen, and a daughter of three. There was a Dutch girl at the table, and Mrs. Davis asked her to write a message in Dutch to their son. “Eddie’s at that age where he’s interested in everything his father did when he was a teenager, everything about the war and Holland,” Mrs. Davis said. We talked awhile, and I mentioned, because those faces were very much with me, that I had met someone whose son was missing in Vietnam. Walter Davis said nothing for a moment. “I never thought of dying then,” he said suddenly, after a while. “I see it a little differently now. I didn’t look at it from the parents’ point of view then. I was eighteen, nineteen. I wanted to go, couldn’t stand not to go. I got to see Paris, Berlin, got to see places I’d heard about but never dreamed I’d see. Now I’ve got a boy, well, in four years maybe he’ll have to go.” Walter Davis broke open a roll, buttered it carefully, and put it down again, untouched. “I see it a little differently now,” he said.
1968
Joan Didion
Fotografía de 光曦 刘 (en Unsplash). Public domain.
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