Pale Blue Eyes
The air was so thick with anticipation that I was having trouble breathing. He sat there
wringing his hands as he struggled to speak the words that had haunted him for forty years. My
father had never struggled to hold a conversation, and proudly declared on several occasions
that he had “never met a stranger,” but on this gloomy Sunday afternoon he grimaced as
though he were in pain trying to seek out the words to describe the nightmare that he had lived
for three years. Although my father had never been a large man, he had always been stout and
strong. I had always worried for days when I had to introduce a boy that I was dating for fear
that my father would intimidate him, as he often did. Now, however, I almost didn’t recognize
the small, frightened figure that I stared at in apprehension. His emotional frailty at this
moment broke my heart. Finally, after waiting what seemed an eternity, he finally looked at
me, a skinny girl of only twenty years old holding a newborn baby, and smiled weakly.
“Go lay the boy in his bed, Pooh”, he said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that everything was okay, and that he didn’t need to tell
me these things that weighed so heavily on him if he wasn’t ready, but he just smiled weakly
and held up his hand to quiet my objections. I did as he asked and put my dreaming baby boy
in his crib to sleep, then I sat on the couch near my father’s chair so that I could be close to him
as he spoke.
“I’ve never spoken to anyone about my time in Vietnam,” he said. “I’m not ashamed of
the choices that I made because we did our best given our situation, but I need you to know
that there were things that we had to do in order to survive.”
He paused to take a breath. His chest filled with so much air that I thought he might
take in all of the air in the room before he continued.
“There were decisions made that no man should ever have to make, but we were still
boys, and we were fighting an army that wasn’t there.”
My father’s sky blue eyes glazed over with tears as he continued. “Your granddad
expected me to join the service when I turned eighteen, and I never wanted to do anything to
disappoint that man. You know how he was”.
I thought back to the old sepia photograph that my grandmother kept next to her bed.
The cheap wooden frame only helped to lend severity to the gaunt, handsome man in the
picture. He was dressed in his army BDU’s (Battle Dress Uniform) waiting for wartime, and
my grandfather’s signature half smile could still be seen despite the picture being nearly sixty
years old. He would have, himself, fought in World War I if he had not been born with flat
feet, a condition which at the time, was not compatible with warfare. “You never got to see the
side of that man that I saw”, my father continued. He was right. The man that I remembered
worked hard, but he laughed often. He was never seen in his garden overalls without a lanky
little blonde girl by his side. I worshipped my grandfather, but I knew the sternness with which
he treated my father. The elder Leslie immediately called me his “boy,” claiming that this way
he would finally have a son.
As all of these memories came flooding back, I looked at the man that I will forever
call “Daddy.” His strong hands had grown callused and dry from hard labor, and I knew the
lengths that he went to in order to give me the life that he never had.
“I knew I was going to get drafted sooner or later, but I also knew how drafted men
were treated. Dad would have never forgiven me if I were drafted. So I enlisted.”
He wet his lips, and paused as he continued. I knew that he was trying to prepare
himself, more than me, for the story that he was about to tell.
“It was 1966, and I was with the 101st Airborne. They called us the Screamin’ Eagles.
I’m not sure who came up with that name, but we liked it okay. We bragged to the other units
that we had jumped out of more airplanes than they would ever fly on. We thought that we
were on top of the world, but we didn’t stay there for long.”
His voice cracked as he delivered this last line, and he suppressed the urge to cry in
front of his little girl. I hardened myself, and tried to pretend not to notice that he was falling
apart. Inside I was shattering.
“Most of us were only eighteen or nineteen, but we pretended to be men. We pretended
not to be bothered by the stories coming out of the jungle: the children with bombs strapped to
them, the men that were dying, the countless that disappeared. We tricked ourselves into
believing that could never happen to us.”
He looked up at me now, but his eyes were vacant. He saw his platoon, his men.
“What we ‘Screamin’ Eagles’ didn’t realize was that our job was to get dropped into
the middle of battles while they were at their worst. We got dropped right in the middle of the
hail of gunfire coming from both sides. When we dropped down we immediately started firing
our weapons and running. What we didn’t know was that the Vietcong had built underground
tunnels and bunkers that their small bodies could fit through. They would come up out of
nowhere and grab you, or worse.”
His breathing had become to get rapid, and the tears were flowing freely now. He made
no attempt to wipe away the streams that poured from his pale blue eyes.
“We were babies, Leslie. Could you imagine sending an eighteen year old boy to a
place like that?”
My daddy composed himself and continued.
“We had raffles over there where a guy could win a ticket to go see The Bob Hope
Show live. It was a way for us to get off that God forsaken piece of dirt, and remember what
it’s like to live for a few days. A friend of mine had won the raffle, but would be going home
during the time that he would be travelling, so he gave the ticket to me.”
I looked to my father’s calloused hands. They were shaking so badly now that even his
constant twisting of them couldn’t keep me from noticing.
“The show was fine, but I remember that it was the first time that I realized how much
people hated the war. Not only the war, but us. They threw things in my face, and called me a
‘baby killer’. God knows that I had to make some tough choices while I was in ‘Nam, but I
never killed anyone that wasn’t trying to kill me first.”
The tears continued to flow, but the sadness in his eyes had been replaced with anger.
“I returned to Vietnam after four days, ready to tell my platoon about the labels that we
were being stuck with, but my CO met me when I stepped off the chopper. I remember how
grim he looked, but I tried to muster a smile. Being over there takes its toll on a man, and I
always tried to keep spirits up. Until he told me that while I was gone my entire platoon had
been wiped out.”
His eyes widened as if this was the first time he was hearing the news. His mouth
agape, he choked on the sob that had been lodged in his throat. I slid onto the floor, and
crawled over to his chair. I now sat on the aged, itchy, tan carpet in front of my father. I wanted
to hold him, to sit in his lap, to tell him to stop thinking of these ghastly things, but I knew that
he needed to tell someone. How could he have kept these horrors a secret for forty years? Even
as my heart broke for him and his companions, it swelled with pride knowing that I had to have
the strongest, most resilient man in the world as a father. I took his dry, beaten hand in mine,
and murmured softly for him to continue.
“The fighting never stopped, Pooh. A week felt like a year. We rode in on planes,
jumped out of planes into gunfire, ran, shot, and got shot at. We either won the battle we were
in, or more often than not we had to hide out until they sent choppers in to pick us up. I can
remember on several occasions, we had to run to get out of the jungle before they napalmed the
whole place.”
Again his face hardened, and his pale blue eyes grew vacant as his mind took him back
forty years.
“Running was the scary part. There were landmines and booby traps everywhere. You
never knew if you were going to get your leg blown off or fall in a trap with spikes. I saw it
every day.”
He stopped abruptly as if he was done with his story and began to wipe his face. I
squeezed his hand, and reluctantly let it slip away so that he could take off his round, wire
rimmed glasses to clean them.
“Pooh, do you know why I keep that?” He gestured to the black POW flag that had
hung in our living room for as long as I could remember.
“No, Daddy”, I whispered softly, “Why?”
“After one of the times that I ran from a napalm strike, I was caught. They beat me up
pretty badly, and took me to one of their ‘camps’ if you could call it that.”
I know that the expression on my face was pure shock and disbelief. My mouth fell
ajar, and my eyes widened in surprise. A faint smile crept across my father’s tan, sun worn face
as he continued,
“They tortured us in ways that I would never tell you or anyone. The cruelty that we
endured at their hands was unimaginable. Out of the five of us that were in that camp, only two
of us left alive.”
A deep sadness filled my father so completely that it radiated from him. I could feel the
heartbreak in the marrow of my bones. He slid his rough hands back into mine, and gripped it
ever so slightly to reassure me that he was okay.
“I always wondered why I was the lucky one. I asked God every day why I was
allowed to survive when these other men had so much more to live for.”
He paused, and shifted his hand to my chin so that our faces were inches from each
other. His pale blue eyes sparkled as he looked at me. They were the same as mine, and the
same as my son’s. Pale eyes that had been passed down through what my dad liked to call the
“onlys” since we were all only children.
He ended his story with a whisper, “And then you came along.”
