Chapter One - “Fortunate Son”

as performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival

My going to war was so inevitable that I enlisted while wisps of smoke were still circling above the extinguished candles on my eighteenth birthday cake. A long family tradition of military service and the weight of generations of expectations sealed the deal. The possibility that my lifeless form might someday end up facedown in the mud of some distant battlefield, or that I could return home with pieces of me missing never engendered a moment of self-reflection. Just hand me a gun and point me in the right direction. Hesitation equates with weakness, or worse, failure. Soldiers don’t question authority if they want to succeed. Besides, the wisdom of my decision to enlist was reaffirmed daily by the reassuring statements churned out by the Johnson White House press office. We were winning in a glorious crusade to keep Southeast Asia from the horrible domination of the Red Menace.

One excuse for my rashness was that I was raised by parents who positively rejected introspection. My doting, Betty Crocker-like mother was an unenviable product of the fifties. In the late afternoons, her housedress transformed into stockings, pearls, and lipstick before my father arrived, as if to hide the tediousness of her mornings from the mundane evenings that inevitably followed. Although she had attended Wayne State University after high school, she dropped out in her sophomore year to marry Raymond, the handsome Korean War vet with “great potential,” as my grandfather used to claim. Their marriage produced three children—me and two younger siblings, Billy and Christine. Although Christine was under the protection of my mother, my brother and I suffered a nearly constant barrage of disapproval from a frustrated man whose “great potential” and middle-class aspirations were often thwarted by working-class prejudices. His military service in Korea and occasional hunting trips to Canada were the only times he left the confines of Detroit and his factory work for the Ford Motor Company. And when I finally was discharged from the service, I was expected to start a life just like his.

My brother, Billy, was another story. We all inherited our mother’s attractive features, but while Christine’s remained soft and delicate, Billy’s and mine were roughened by our father’s manly angularity. Only one year my junior, Billy seemed much younger and looked absolutely nothing like me. I came with dirty-blond hair without the hint of curl, while he was topped by auburn ringlets, almost too precious for a boy. I was solid and well muscled, while he was slender and graceful. My eyes were a blazing blue, and his were a deep, thoughtful brown. He was scholarly, and I was . . . well I was said to have a forceful personality. If I was a fighter, he was the poet. While I unwisely defied our father at every opportunity, Billy hid behind a pile of books and mostly ignored the rancor that permeated our household. He could be found at the library more often than at the empty lot that served as a makeshift ball field at the end of our street, where I happened to spend most of my childhood.

Perhaps our appearance or demeanor or the goddamned look in our eyes somehow presented a challenge to our father, engendering his simultaneous admiration and contempt. I think psychologists call it transference, but back then it forced me to protect my own ass and that of my brother. I didn’t mind. Constant admonishment taught me to stand up for myself, to persevere, to be a young warrior even in my own home and, eventually, whatever part of me that once harbored a gentle nature soon withered from neglect.

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I’d always been a good shot. My father recognized my talent early on and bought me my very own bolt-action, Remington Model 700 rifle and a box of cartridges. It didn’t occur to him that a new Schwinn bicycle probably would have been a more appropriate gift for a ten-year-old, but to me, it represented my entry into that mysterious realm of manhood. The two of us often drove out to an empty, overgrown field near the abandoned Willow Run Airport to practice shooting paper targets. It was the only time during those early years that I remember having anything approaching a normal relationship with my old man.

I soon became more proficient than him, which might have humiliated him some, but I didn’t understand that at the time. I simply thought it was a chance for me to win his begrudging admiration, which I did as long as I held a gun.

The next year, my dad decided that I should join him and a few of his army buddies on their annual deer-hunting venture to northwestern Ontario. Our destination was across the border from Minnesota, along the banks of Rainy Lake, a few miles outside of Fort Frances. The town of Fort Frances, with its one-pump Sunoco gas station and cinder-block diner, was unremarkable, and we stopped there only to resupply. We weren’t there for sightseeing; we were there to hunt.

I knew my .22 was too small to bring down a big buck, but it could slow one down enough for my father to finish him off with his lever-action .30-30 Winchester. Most of the time, I contented myself with taking potshots at any rabbits foolish enough to wander within range. When my father finally deemed me old enough to handle his gun, I tagged some bigger trophies, but it would be a few more years before I saved up enough money to purchase a real hunting rifle of my own, just like my dad’s Winchester.

The winter I turned fourteen, the Ontario woods seemed to magically transform him from the gruff, oppositional person he was at home into a kind of primordial woodsman who temporarily viewed me as a scion worthy of his time and instruction. He usually was a reticent, mostly unapproachable man, and I think I knew even then that winning his approval would be a lifelong endeavor, but I never gave up. In the frigid, predawn mornings up in that deer stand, ensconced in cozy layers of thick flannel, I felt an uneasy communion with my dad.

One morning, the winter wind that swept east across the barren, ice-crusted fields of Manitoba had mostly exhausted itself by the time it reached us, with barely the strength to lift feathery swirls of snow from the nearby trees. We stayed out all day, dusted in whiteness, numbed from the cold, and stiff from hours of immobility. We were an invisible part of the forest. The crisp stillness was punctuated by infrequent and distant echoes of discharging firearms, but for most of the day, we sat in total silence. I imagined that my dad and I were the last people left on earth—a frightening thought, to be sure.

As twilight descended, the other hunters assembled on the forest floor below us, summoned from their hiding places by the idea of a warm fire. Snow squeaked beneath our boots as we trudged back to the cabin empty-handed. Each of us gathered an armful of wood by the front door and stomped the snow from our boots before entering. I was looking forward to a hot meal but was even more eager to hear their war stories, recounted in the flickering firelight. Even at that age, I knew most of their stories were bullshit, but they contained enough truth to open a small window into what I imagined was my father’s soul.

During the Korean conflict, the old friends who now warmed their feet by the fire had been stationed together near Seoul. They casually smoked in the flickering light, their necks thickened from encroaching middle age and their faces obscured behind a week’s worth of whiskers. In some respects, time seemed to have stood still for them. Since leaving the army, most had married, started families, and settled in the upper Midwest, where jobs were abundant in the 1950s, but every winter, they looked forward to these few weeks when they could trade familiar, time-softened complaints about their former lives. It was the same every year, but I never tired of the stories. Even the routine acts of soldiering took on an aura of significance. They talked of comrades, some fallen in battle, but most slipping back into a prewar existence upon separation. Their nostalgia for an orderly, conscripted world was palpable, and as I sat spellbound, listening to exaggerated feats of bravery, I hoped someday to have my own war stories to tell.

Back then, I saw war as “the great equalizer,” mixing people from all walks of life who otherwise never would have met, especially after Truman integrated the military shortly after the end of the Second World War. War’s unintentional diversity could be traced as far back as the Civil War, when city boys who had never encountered a living cow were thrown together with country lads who were unconvinced that any building could or should be taller than their barns.

The next dawn, a fresh blanket of snow muted the sounds of the forest as my father and I once again perched in our tree stand high above a frozen travel corridor, waiting for the does to discover the bait we’d set for them. It was rutting season, and the females inevitably brought in the single-minded, hormone-driven bucks. My sense of fair play was offended at the manipulation of those poor, addled bucks, but I willingly overlooked the injustice for a chance to take one down.

Midmorning, I finally spotted a thin-legged silhouette against the brilliant, white backdrop of snow. She was about forty yards from us, head down, nosing aside the snow to uncover hidden blades of grass. My father had seen her too. Neither of us moved. Perhaps sensing my excitement, she suddenly lifted her head. The reason for her alarm soon became apparent when a young buck appeared several yards behind her. His four-pointed antlers still displayed a bit of drying velvet. Keeping his head low, he followed her scent and seemed unconcerned with his surroundings—focused only on getting to that doe. With minimal movement, I silently chambered a round and carefully lifted my rifle to take aim. I slowed my breathing and heart rate as I lined up my target, using the iron sights along the barrel of my rifle. (My gun wouldn’t be equipped with a scope for another year.) By now, the doe had moved a few yards farther away, and the buck followed her, oblivious to the danger. I exhaled until my lungs were almost empty before gently squeezing the trigger. The recoil slammed into my flannel-padded shoulder and reverberated off the nearby trees, creating a shock wave that caused tiny icicles to break off from the bare branches and pierce the snow below in what looked like a line of miniature daggers. The doe sprinted away, defiantly flicking the white underside of her tail as she quickly disappeared. Meanwhile, the surprised buck fell to his knees, collapsed heavily onto his side, and died without a sound.

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