or saying a word.
Dad put the paper
down and sighed. “I am tired of
your mother’s protests.”
★ ★ ★
Mom has always been
sensitive, smart, and involved.
She cries when she reads
about the deaths in
Vietnam, and the racist
murders in the South,
and anything else
that shows people at their worst.
She liked to tell me,
“The Beatles are right,
Ashe: all you need is love.” When
she’d say that, Mom looked
a starving kind of
lonely. I knew she meant that
America and
the rest of the world
would be better off if love
somehow trumped hatred,
but I also knew
she wanted love for herself.
Even though she lived
with me and Dad, she
was lonely, and no amount
of activism
could fill the awful
emptiness that made her yearn
for true, lasting love.
February 1968
Week Six: 400
Mr. Ruby pinned
a newspaper photo on
the bulletin board.
It wasn’t a stock
picture of atrocities:
no naked corpses
littered the jungle
floor, no burned-out huts smoldered
with napalm. No dead
bodies were in sight,
but it was a scene of death
caught right in the act.
A Vietnamese
police chief stood with his back
to the camera;
his right arm was raised,
holding a pistol inches
from a skinny kid’s
head. The kid wore a
baggy plaid shirt, and his hands
were tied behind his
back. The cop looked as
quiet as the empty street
behind them, and the
fog of war cast a
haze over the buildings in
the background. The kid’s
eyes were closed, and the
side of his head looked flattened,
as if a sudden
burst of air had smacked
him. Though I couldn’t see the
bullet, I knew I
was witnessing an
execution in Saigon.
In the photograph
a Vietnamese
soldier looked on, smiling. The
looks of anguish, joy,
and businesslike death
in that photo made me feel
sick to my stomach.
★ ★ ★
Nothing good lasted
at home. Mom attended an
anti-war rally
again, and Dad flipped
out. Even upstairs in my
hideout, I could hear
the yelling. But last
night was different. Mom used
to stand up to Dad,
to throw it right back
at him, but the only voice
I heard was Dad’s, and
he was really cranked.
There’d be a lull in his storm,
and I’d listen for
Mom to shout back, but
nothing. I heard nothing. A
terrifying thought
seized me. Had he hit
her? Was she hurt? In the past,
nothing could silence
Mom. I crept to my
door, listening and waiting.
And then Dad’s roaring
returned, and I felt
a weird kind of relief. Not
because of his rage,
but because it meant
that Mom was okay. I mean,
even Dad wouldn’t
scream at someone who’s
unconscious. Mom was still there,
I knew that, but she
wasn’t fighting back,
at least not the way she used
to. Something had changed.
February 1968
Week Seven: 543
I was six years old
when I realized that my
parents didn’t love
each other. Dad and
I were playing catch in the
backyard, and Mom sat
on the patio
reading a book. It took a
little while to get
the hang of it, but
pretty soon I caught every
ball Dad tossed to me.
“That’s my boy,” he said,
and patted my head. I leapt
into his arms, like
a puppy, and he
hugged me. While in his embrace
I pleaded, “Mom, come
on!” She must have seen
my eagerness, so she set
her book down and stood
next to us. I looped
one arm around Dad’s neck and
reached my other arm
around Mom’s. Feeling
their love for me, I tugged to
pull them closer, to
knit us into a
tight group hug, but Dad leaned right
and Mom leaned left, and
I spanned the distance
between them like a bombed-out
bridge. The love I had
felt fell into the
gulf between them, and I knew
they loved me, but not
each other. That’s a
crummy thing to learn when you’re
only six years old.
★ ★ ★
So I grew up in
divided territory,
a home with clearly
defined boundaries
that my parents rarely crossed.
Most of the time we
lived under a cease-
fire interrupted by
occasional flare-
ups. Sadly, the key
members of my family
couldn’t hold
together, so my
heart was torn, equal shares of
love for Mom and Dad.
February 1968
Week Eight: 470
On the board, Mr.
Ruby had “Orangeburg, South
Carolina” and
had written below
that: “3: 17, 18,
and 19.” I knew
those weren’t the weekly
Vietnam casualties,
but they had to be
important somehow.
What happened in Orangeburg?
That night, I went to
the Tempe Public
Library to see what I
could find about it.
★ ★ ★
The library was
quiet when I entered, and
the librarian
shot me a look that
said I better make sure it
stayed that way. Nodding,
I headed to the
newspaper shelf that had a
couple weeks’ worth of
The New York Times in
tidy stacks and started to
go through them. It took
a while, but I found
a small article about
a riot started
by some Negro kids
because they weren’t allowed in
a segregated
bowling alley. They
commenced making trouble, and
when the cops showed up,
bricks, and those Southern police
don’t put up with that
stuff, especially
from Negroes, so they started
shooting people.
When
it was all over,
twenty-eight people were hurt
and three people were
dead: eighteen-year-old
Samuel Hammond, Jr.;
a nineteen-year-old
kid by the name of
Henry Ezekial Smith;
and a boy about
my age, Delano
Herman Middleton, who was
only seventeen.
I set the paper
down and wondered what could make
a bunch of people
mad enough to start
rioting when they knew the
streets were patrolled by
trigger-happy cops
looking for an excuse to
punish protestors.
Blacks had it lousy,
especially in the South,
but did they really
think a riot would
make things better? Buried deep
in the Times, like it
didn’t matter, the
story made me realize
Vietnam wasn’t
the only place where
Americans were getting
killed. It’s happening
here at home, too, but
no one is counting the ghosts
sprouting on our soil.
March 1968
Week Nine: 542
To Dad, the news was
like church, and Walter Cronkite
was its pastor. But
after last Tuesday’s
special report, Dad stared at
the TV. “I’ll be
a son of a bitch,”
he said over and over.
Surprise and anger
rocked him, but Mom looked
jubilant. Smiling like she’d
won a victory,
she stood up, winked at
me, and went to the kitchen
to finish cleaning
up while Dad sat stunned
by Cronkite’s betrayal of
America. I
agreed when Cronkite
said we should leave Vietnam,
“not as victors, but
as honorable
people who lived up to their
promise to defend
democracy, and
did the best they could.” He was
right. It was time for
us to end the war.
How many had already
died? How many more
would die if we kept
fighting? How much more blood would
it take to conquer
a Southeast Asian
country on the other side
of the world? If the
war didn’t end soon,
would my own blood help pay the
price of Vietnam?
March 1968
Week Ten: 509
A new girl showed up
in Mr. Ruby’s class. Tall,
with straight blond hair that
hung past her shoulders—
and gorgeous without trying.
White peace signs and doves
covered her tie-dyed
tee shirt, and while our teacher
signed her admit slip,
she looked around the
room like she owned the place. No
shyness. No fear. Just
confidence. Plenty
of confidence. When Mr.
Ruby finished, he
handed her the slip
and pointed at me. “Take that
desk behind Ashe.” My
heart thumped when she walked
I’d never seen a
high school girl like her.
She looked like a goddess, a
tall, beautiful blond
goddess. I wanted
to turn around and talk to
her, to look at her,
but Mr. Ruby
must have read my mind. “Ashe, you’ll
get to know your new
classmate later, but
now you need to focus on
history, okay?”
And then he started
writing on the chalkboard. But
all I remember
from that class is the
stunning look of the new girl,
her perfume, and my
hunger to find out
why I felt like a magnet
attracted to steel.
★ ★ ★
Angela Turner
was the girl’s name, and she was
from Los Angeles,
“L.A.,” she called it.
Like me, she was the only
kid at home; unlike
me, she wasn’t her
family’s only offspring.
She had a brother
in Vietnam. When
I heard that, I felt ashamed
by the “Hell no, I
won’t go” tee shirt I
had worn to school that day, but
then I remembered
that she was dressed like
a hippie, and it surprised
me that she would be
anti-war with a
brother stuck in Vietnam.
The newspapers can’t
print everything, but
I could read between the lines,
and I’d seen enough
news clips and photos
to know it was absolute
hell, hell on earth. If
I had a brother
in Vietnam, what would I
do? Probably I
would oppose the war
but support him as much as
I possibly could.
Unfortunately,
I didn’t have a brother
or sister to think
about. I never
had anyone share my room,
my parents, my life.
I grew up in a
house that was quiet as a
graveyard, except for
the occasional
explosions that ripped through our
lives without warning.
March 1968
Week Eleven: 336
Mr. Ruby’s eyes
turned red and watery when
he told us about
the Tet Offensive.
“They caught us by surprise, and
we’ve lost too many”—
his voice trembled, and
we all listened, dead silent,
while he took a deep
breath and continued—
“far too many of our boys
there.” The sorrow on
his face and in his
voice paralyzed everyone.
He looked down at the
floor while, spellbound by
his emotion, we waited
for what would come next.
He started crying.
Standing in front of us with
tears streaming down his
cheeks, Mr. Ruby
looked around, his eyes burning
into us. “It’s a
shame, you know, a damn
shame that we’re in a stupid
war that has led to
senseless suffering
for the civilians and the
soldiers on both sides.”
Then he went silent,