Timberg - Blue-eyed boy: a memoir

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL

F alling asleep is never a problem for me. Waking up always is. My first night in South Vietnam I was sitting on a hill, relieving myself in a jerry-built four-holer ingeniously fashioned of plywood and wire mesh to keep out flying insects that once inside quickly became shit-besotted dive-bombers. Down the hill, maybe three or four clicks distant, a firefight was raging. As I watched the crisscrossing tracers, I murmured, This is one scary fucking place. Then I headed for the tent that was my home until I could be transported to the outskirts of Chu Lai, where my battalion had already dug in. I lay down on a cot, fully dressed, the pop-pop-pop of small-arms fire buffeting my ears, the memory of intersecting tracers still claiming my minds eye. Scary, yes, but I was asleep in less than a minute.

Waking up is a different story, as it was on the day, four decades later, that gave rise to this book. Sometimes I dont hear the alarm. Other times I hear it but hit the snooze bar and fall back to sleep for another half hour or so. But even with the extra rest, I often get up groggy and worried that Ill arrive at the office uncomfortably late.

So I hasten into the bathroom for my morning routineshower, shave, and the other things that most men do on automatic pilot. By then Im both groggy and moving quickly. I glance occasionally at the mirror as I shave, though not often because I only need to shave my neck and a tiny tuft of hairI think of it as a survivoron the left side of my chin. I sometimes focus briefly on my face, but I usually can ignore it. Im used to it.

At least I thought I was until that recent day when, for no apparent reason, I stopped and stared at the face looking back at me from the mirror. And I lost it.

Enough already! I shouted. Ive been this way since 1967, forty fucking years, and its time for this shit to end! The jokes over. Its not funny anymore.

It was, I told myself, time to return to normal, for my face to heal, for the scar tissue to become the soft, unlined skin it used to be. I had been wounded at twenty-six; I wanted to look like I would if I had just aged naturally. My guess was I would look pretty good. I had been a reasonably good-looking guy when I rolled over that goddamned land mine. And probably I would look younger than my years, slightly gray but limber, and reasonably attractive, at least to women within a decade or two of my age. I had four terrific kids with two great wives, though I had managed to screw up both marriages. And I was tired of being alone, as I had been for the past twelve years.

I am not being unduly hard on myself in saying that my actions wrecked both marriages. Its the truth. Along the way, though, I also did some good things. I had a handI guess I was a junior partnerin raising four kids I couldnt be more proud of. I was a newspaper editor and reporter for more than thirty years, mostly in Washington. I wrote three well-received books. I was editor-in-chief of a prestigious military journal. My most significant achievement, though, came much earlier, when as a young man I somehow reclaimed my future after a life-altering event that threatened to lay waste to the rest of my days.

Reclaimed my future has a bullshit, self-help-book sound that I hate. Dont worry, I wont resort to it again, at least I dont think I will. But I know there is something true here, something real and fragile that now, as I edge into my seventies, I need to take time to look at. Properly. Slowly. Without screaming. Without fear of being late. I suspect theres something essentially human about what I fought my way through. Somewhere buried in my memory, hidden beneath this terrible mask of scar tissue. I want to remember how I decided not to die. To not let my future die.

I am, of course, just one of many to confront such a decision. Another is John McCain. I am McCains biographer, having written about him at length in two books. He is a man of extraordinary courage who was routinely beaten and tortured during five and a half years in North Vietnamese prisons. My interest in him arose because of his ability, rare among veterans of that long-ago war, to put Vietnam behind him, or off to the side, or in some forgotten corner of the attic where he keeps the rest of his war-related junk.

Doing so made it possible for him to fashion a productive life, without being immobilized by the past. I have a ready answer when asked how he was able to do so after the brutality he endured in prison: Ive always believed that when John McCain was released from captivity, he said to himself, Whatever life has in store for me, good or bad, Im going to achieve it, prison or no prison.