who’d pay for college?
November 1968
Week Forty-Eight: 228
We ate Thanksgiving
dinner at Angela’s house.
Somehow, her mom had
the energy to
host a big meal despite all
their worries about
Kelly. Their home felt
so cozy that Mom and I
lingered long after
dinner. Sharing the
holiday together did
something for both our
broken families,
so when Angela’s dad asked
us to celebrate
Christmas with them next
month, Mom and I agreed right
away. The warmth from
Angela and her
parents filled the room, and we
floated home on it.
★ ★ ★
Mom gasped when she saw
Dad’s car parked in front of our
house. I steered into
the driveway and shut
off the engine. Mom looked mad—
or scared—and tightened
her grip on Rosa,
who had started to cry. “Take
Rosa inside,” I
said. “I’ll deal with Dad.”
While they left, I got out of
the car and met him
in the front yard. He
reeked of beer. “Is that the black
bastard?” “Rosa,” I
said. “My sister’s name
is Rosa.” I sounded a
hundred times calmer
than I felt. A flash
of pain twisted Dad’s face. “How
can you consider
her a sister? Do
you know what your mother did
to me? To us?” He
stepped closer. “Come on,
Ashe. I can take you away
from all this right now.”
December 1968
Week Forty-Nine: 192
“One ninety-two” was
on the board, and beneath it,
Mr. Ruby wrote
“30,000.” He
took a deep breath and told us
that this week, the death
toll in Vietnam
since 1961 hit
that number. He snapped
his fingers. “That’s half
of all the residents of
Tempe. Dead.” He snapped
his fingers again.
“Gone. The loss is crushing, but
it doesn’t even
include civilians,
POWs, or those
missing in action—
and we can’t even
begin to calculate what
we’ve suffered at home.”
I thought about those
weekly casualty counts,
the stern mug shots of
local guys killed in
action, Kelly MIA,
and the trauma in
my own home. Mr.
Ruby really knew what he
was talking about.
December 1968
Week Fifty: 222
Last week, two letters
dropped on our house like mortar
shells. The first announced
that a judge would soon
end our financial support
from Dad. Rosa and
Mom would be cut off
forever; me, too—unless
I lived with my dad.
Abandon Rosa
and Mom, and he’d pay all my
college expenses,
thus guaranteeing
a four-year draft deferment.
Stay with Mom and lose
everything. Dad’s threat
burned me, but Mom stayed cool. “We
can count on Marcus,”
she said. “It won’t be
easy, but he’ll send enough
for us to get by.”
Her tightlipped smile showed
her determination to
keep this part of our
family intact.
She opened the next letter,
and while she scanned the
page, her hand trembled,
and her determined façade
faded. She dropped the
letter and grabbed me
like she was drowning. “Marcus
is dead,” she whispered.
December 1968
Week Fifty-One: 151
Angela cried when
she heard, and worry spilled out
with her tears. “What are
you going to do,
Ashe? What are you going to
do?” She hugged me and
wouldn’t let go. Mom
worried, too, when I said I’d
quit school and get a
job. “That’s crazy! What
about college? Live with your
dad—something will work
out for us.” Her words
dripped with doubt. Dad had tossed a
grenade into our
family, and Mom
wanted to be the hero.
I couldn’t let her;
I couldn’t live with
Dad while Mom and Rosa were
had us trapped, and
I had to figure out the
answer. Angela
and I stayed up late
talking about options, and
though she wouldn’t say
it, there was only
one that might work, one she and
I couldn’t discuss.
December 1968
Week Fifty-Two: 113
Christmas brought no gifts
except time, plenty of time
for thinking about
what heroes do. I
figured out that a hero
is someone who risks
his life for something
greater than himself. Throughout
history, people
have accepted risks
for some greater good, and I
could think of nothing
greater than the well-
being of Mom and Rosa.
I loved them more than
I hated war—and
even more than I feared death.
It was my turn to
sacrifice. When she
found out, Angela pounded
my chest, then collapsed
into me, sobbing.
She agreed to meet at the
Greyhound bus depot
to say goodbye and
swore she would keep my secret
until I was gone.
★ ★ ★
Waiting for the bus,
we sat on a wooden bench
holding hands, talking,
and kissing like there
was no tomorrow—and I
learned that mourning starts
with goodbye. When I
stood to leave, I gave her my
MIA bracelet.
February 1969
Week Eight: 197
My DI at Fort
Polk loved to say, “Boot camp will
make men out of boys,”
but he really meant
that boot camp turns hearts of flesh
into hearts of stone.
You can’t kill if you
feel. For eight grueling weeks, we
ran, climbed, crawled, fought, fired,
and ran some more on
little food and less sleep. I
dropped into my bunk
each night like a dead
man, only to be rousted
before the sun cracked
the horizon, and
except for five minutes a
week, I had neither
the energy nor
the time to write letters home
or think anything
but what the Army
expected me to think. I
graduated and
posed for my Army
photograph, staring like I
was dead serious.
May 1969
Week Eighteen: 163
I belong to the
101st Airborne now,
and our CO said
we should all buy life
insurance, so I did, and
before I deployed,
I made sure my pay
goes to Mom—and if I don’t
make it, she’ll get the
insurance, too. A
humid hell is my home now,
with death lurking in
jungle shadows. I
flinch at everything, and my
M16’s always
ready to kill. On
night patrols, two things keep me
going: survival
and the people I
love. I dream of Rosa, Mom,
Angela—even
Dad—and wonder if
they’re looking at this same moon,
thinking about me.
May 1969
Week Twenty: 184
Hill 937
Dug in, waiting for
Operation Apache
Snow to launch. My fox-
hole feels too shallow.
I can’t stop the sweats and shakes:
Am I sick—or scared?
If you can’t read this,
it’s because I am writing
it in a hurry.
I see Death coming
up the hill, and I am not
ready to meet him.
Historical Note
The last two stanzas of this book are based on an American soldier’s letter written shortly before he died in the assault on Hamburger Hill in May 1969. His letter appeared as part of an article, “One Week’s Dead,” published in Life magazine on June 27, 1969. The full text can be viewed online: http://life.time.com/history/faces-of-the-american-dead-in-vietnam-one-weeks-toll/#1.
The official death toll for U.S. soldiers in Vietnam in 1968 is 16,592. If you’re a numbers person, you’ll notice that the sum of the weekly death counts Ashe reads in the newspapers is something less than 16,592. Here’s why:
By 1968, the war in Vietnam was extremely unpopular, so it’s likely that the weekly press releases underreported the dead to minimize the tragic consequences of our involvement in Southeast Asia.
Even if military leaders wanted an accurate weekly death count, tallying the numbers was difficult because of the nature of the war. Some units in distant parts of Vietnam simply may not have been able to submit their reports on time—or at all.
MIAs were not counted as dead until their bodies were recovered and identified, a process that could take more than a year.
In the chaos of war, even a dedicated clerk made mistakes. Such mistakes probably would not have been caught before the weekly report was announced.
There is no database that lists the 1968 casualties by week, so I did what Ashe would have done: I reviewed the Thursday edition of daily newspapers for each week’s death count. The numbers that head each chapter are the numbers reported in newspapers in the fifty-two weeks that comprised 1968.
Author’s Note
When historical novelist Gary D. Schmidt visited my classes at BYU in 2010, he mentioned that more U.S. soldiers died in 1968 than in any other year of the Vietnam War. A year later, I started working on a novel set in 1968 and decided to see if Schmidt had been right. It turned out he was: 16,592 American soldiers died in 1968. As I began digging into the history, I also learned that the weekly casualty reports appeared in newspapers each Thursday, but by 1968, the reports had become so commonplace that many Americans barely noticed them. I wanted my main character to notice and become fascinated by the death counts as he gained an awareness of the troubled world around him.
I started writing the novel in prose, but after a few chapters, the project stalled. Rather than give up, I tinkered with the prose, with the point of view, with the character’s voice, but nothing seemed to help. In an early draft, I had enjoyed inserting historical information like Ashe’s birthday, May 17, 1954, the date of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, and that’s when the prime number 17 started growing on me, so I looked for other opportunities to plant the number into the story. Playing with numbers was fun for a while, but it soon became clear that no amount of number play would revive my manuscript.
During this period of writer’s block, I woke up early one morning with the story on my mind, and as I lay in bed, I started thinking about the number 17 and the other numbers that appeared in the story and wondered how I might use them. What else relied on 17? Well, haiku has 17 syllables; maybe I could have my character write haiku as a hobby. Or maybe I could divide the book into 17 sections and have a haiku introduce each section. What else? Was 1968 divisible by 17? It’d be cool if it was. The 1968 death toll, 16,592, was a big number, and I wondered if it might be divisible by 17. I rolled out of bed, found a calculator, and punched in the numbers. Guess what? The number 1968 isn’t evenly divisible by 17, but 16,592 is: 16,592 divided by 17 equals 976.
Then a jolt of creative surprise shook me. What if I wrote the novel entirely in haiku? What if the novel contained one syllable for every U.S. soldier who died in 1968? What if the entire story were contained by a syllable count? It sounded crazy. It sounded like a stupid gimmick. It sounded impossible. But I decided to try it anyway.
The novel took off. Of course, the format was maddening, and revision was incredibly complicated. I soon learned that when your writing is bound up in clusters of 17 syllables arranged in lines of five, seven, and five, a single word change ripples forward and backward and causes much more rewriting and wordsmithing than I could have imagined.
The number 17 had one more surprise for me. Without my planning it, that prime number came into play in the book’s final scene. I wanted Ashe to be writing about 1968 in retrospect and decided to do some research to find out what had been the bloodiest week in Vietnam in 1969. It was the battle of Hamburger Hill, a few days in the middle of May. Somehow it seemed fitting to end Ashe’s story there, but it wasn’t until the umpteenth revision that I discovered that by using Hamburger Hill as the concluding event, I had Ashe’s story end on his 18th birthday: May 17, 1969. It seemed like a fitting way to bring his story and the number 17 full circle.
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to many people for this book. First, to the men and women who served their country during the Vietnam era in a horrendous war, and to the families that supported them. Next to the historians who documented not only the war but also everything else that rocked the world in 1968. My agent, Patricia J. Campbell, encouraged me to try the prose-to-haiku revision, and after reading a few chapters, she pressed me to take it further. Christy Hughes provided a careful and very smart read of an early version of the manuscript and offered detailed suggestions for revision that proved helpful in rewriting the manuscript. Dr. Jesse Crisler read through the first full draft and gave me suggestions on historical details that reshaped my revisions. John H. Ritter read a near-final copy of the manuscript and offered wisdom and feedback that helped me fine-tune the story. My editor, Karen Grove, took a gamble on this story and its format and helped me reshape the novel and stick to the 17-syllable, five-seven-five stanza consistently from start to finish. Finally, I must thank my wife and best friend, Elizabeth, the new girl who showed up in one of my high school classes in 1969 and who has changed my life for the better ever since.
About the Author
CHRIS CROWE, a professor of English at Brigham Young University, has published award-winning fiction and nonfiction for teenagers, poetry, essays, books, and many articles for academia and magazines. He is a popular speaker and writer with librarians and teachers, and received the 2010 Ted Hipple Service Award from A
LAN, the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents. He lives with his wife in Provo, Utah.