The Price

By Steve Wright

A middle aged father has a secret. His son was raised to believe his dad served honorably in the Army as a Military Policeman in Vietnam. Now his son is 18 years old, and it is time to tell him the truth about how his dad had spent a year in Canada as a draft resistor before finally succumbing to the draft and serving in Vietnam. The father had struggled with how to explain his actions since the day a family member spilled the beans about his days as a draft dodger in Canada several years ago. Back then he promised to explain it all to his son when he turned 18. Now that his son turned 18, it is time to keep his promise and try and explain the sequence of events that led to his decision to go to Canada and then return to the USA to face the consequences of resisting the draft. The father hoped his explanation would help his son understand the world better and not make some of the same mistakes he had made. Moreover, his son had always been a responsible young man and the father did not want this to change. He was concerned that somehow, the sins of the father might be visited on the son by revealing the truth about his past. The father spends months preparing himself and then tells the story to his son while they are visiting his old Army buddy and taking a skiing vacation in Vermont. The story he tells traces the major events in the fathers life from the time when the brother of a close neighborhood friend was killed in Vietnam in 1965 to the time when the father was released from the Army in 1973. The son takes it all in, but the father has no way of knowing what impact, if any, his story will ultimately have on his son.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781466981218

Steve Wright

Steve Wright is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. He is the author of the classic survey of Italian autonomist theory Storming Heaven (Pluto, 2017), now in its second edition.

Book preview

© Copyright 2008 Steve Wright.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

First Edition

November 7, 2002 Library of Congress

US Copyright Office No.

TXu 1-080-332, 11-20-02

Note for Librarians: A cataloguing record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada at www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html

ISBN: 978-1-4251-8745-3

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8121-8 (ebook)

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Contents

Chapter 1. In the Beginning

Chapter 2. The Gang at 18

Chapter 3-A Casualty of War

Chapter 4-March on Washington in 68

Chapter 5-Summer/Fall of 69

Chapter 6-The Magic Bus

Chapter 7-Canada in 70

Chapter 8-Vietnam 1972

Chapter 9-Homecoming

Chapter 1. In the Beginning

He thought about how he was going to tell the story to his son one more time. The key was to stick to the metaphor. Over the past several weeks he had reviewed each piece of the story in his mind and how he could use the metaphor to help put things in perspective and explain his past in a way he hoped his son would understand. He had been searching for a way to explain things to his son for several years, ever since his brothers spilled the beans about Canada. How could one man have been a draft dodger in Canada and then end up being a Vietnam veteran? He had finally hit on the metaphor idea, and it seemed to tie everything together.

He pressed the power off button on the remote and then laid it on the night stand. He closed his eyes and stretched out on the bed and tried to get comfortable. Tomorrow was going to be a big day and he needed to get some sleep. They would be leaving after breakfast, about 8 AM, and it was now close to midnight. If he fell asleep within the next 15 minutes, he could get about 7 hours of sleep. That should be plenty to sustain him for the day.

He had promised to explain Canada to his son several years ago. It was actually a way of putting it off. I’ll explain that to you when you turn 18 years old. That was a good stalling strategy that gave him time to think about how to tell him, and also give his son time to grow up a little. He was worried about how his son would react to his explanation, how his son would think of him in the future, and how these things from the past might influence his son’s future. He wanted his son to understand him better, and also learn from his mistakes. He was worried that his past would somehow discourage his son, or give him license to be reckless. Up to now, his son had been a good kid. No drugs and not much drinking. He was thankful for that and did not want to do or say anything that would cause his son’s good behavior to change.

Now he rolled over and tried to get comfortable again. Lying in that bed used to bother him since it was the bed he and the ex-wife had bought when they were first married. These days he referred to his ex-wife as the ex or the children’s mother. The bed was part of an inexpensive, but solid queen size pine bedroom set with two bed-stands, a highboy dresser, and a low bureau with a mirror. He ended up with the entire bedroom set after the divorce. She did not want it. At the time, his feelings were hurt that she would give up their bedroom set. He guessed it was symbolic of how she wanted to put the marriage behind her and move on without him. Something she said during the divorce always bothered him, even to this day. All my friends say that I could have done much better than you. Now that was a helluva thing to say to someone you had been married to for 15 years and had two children with. He tried to put that thought out of his mind since he would never get to sleep if he started opening up old wounds.

They had spent fifteen years of marriage in that bed. They had moved the bed to 2 different houses over the course of their marriage. They had conceived their two children in that bed, and also two babies that miscarried. The divorce was finalized more than 4 years ago and now the bed was just another piece of furniture, more or less. She had broken the covenant of the marriage for whatever reasons. He had other women in the bed since the divorce and he felt that he had broken the sanctity of the marriage bed on his side. The bed was no longer a symbol of the marriage to him. It was just a bed.

He remembered the first woman he had kissed after the break-up. He had never cheated while he was married and back then, he was having trouble getting used to the idea of being with another woman. Even though the ex had a boyfriend during the break-up and had been cheating, he somehow felt like he was cheating when he kissed that woman. He wanted to kiss her, but when their lips met it felt different from what he was used to. Her lips were a different shape and they tasted differently. He told himself repeatedly that it was OK to kiss another woman and it only took a few dates with this new woman to get over it. Just shows you how adaptable people can be.

He laid in bed and thought about the other rooms in the house. He still had a lot of furniture left over from the marriage, the kitchen table and chairs, the piano in the living room, the Queen Ann coffee table, a sofa, and several desks. There was grand-pop’s smoking table, the one he remembered from when he was a little boy and visited his grandparents who lived around the block. He also had some things from his father’s house, the dining room table, and some tools in the basement. Dad had died 3 years ago, about one year after the divorce. Then mom died two years later and he had a lot of her furniture too, sofas, framed prints, and the antique china closet. There were still boxes of mom’s things in the basement. There were memories everywhere. Maybe the best thing for him to do would be to get rid of all this stuff and start over again. He thought about what the house might look like with all new furniture and eventually fell asleep.

Morning came and he was up at 7 AM. He called for Matt who was asleep in the downstairs bedroom, and they started getting ready. They had a quick breakfast of bagels, OJ, and coffee.

It was time to pack-up the Pathfinder and get going. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and Matt was on the school holiday vacation. Their plan was to visit one of dad’s old Army buddies in Maine for a few days and then ski in Vermont on the way back. They were leaving from home in Southern New Jersey near Philadelphia, PA. It would be a 10 hour plus trip up to Tom’s house in Bangor, Maine. Although the Pathfinder was a 4 door, 4 wheel drive model, it was starting to fill-up. Bags of clothes, skis, boots, and sleeping bags were carefully packed into the truck. There was enough room to load the skis into the truck rather than keep them on a rack on top.

They were leaving on a Saturday morning after breakfast. It was clear and cold with overcast skies. Good driving weather. Now the car was packed and it was time for one more check of the house. It was a small ranch style house he purchased 4 years ago during the divorce. At the time he figured that he would be living alone and have weekly overnights with the kids. It was the best house he could find at the time. It was located on a cul de sac with huge trees planted when the development was built in the early fifties. It was a very quiet neighborhood. Most of the people were retired. The ex lived on the other side of town in a small cape-cod style house. The town was small enough so that the kids could walk from one house to school in the morning and then walk to the other house in the afternoon. This allowed the children to see both parents frequently, and allowed the parents to avoid each other as much as possible. There was a true old fashioned town center with a main street, shops, restaurants and a supermarket. It was one of the few old fashioned towns in the area. Most of the other towns in the region were just a bunch of developments all connected by roads without a true identity. That was the sort of place he had lived in down in Washington, DC.

The ex had grown-up here in this little town and had been the valedictorian of her high school class of about 100 students. He wondered what would have happened if they had moved somewhere else after leaving DC. Maybe things would have turned out differently if they had moved to a different town.

He grew up in the city where the largest and tallest building in the neighborhood was the Catholic church. The Catholic church in his neighborhood had two spires and a bell tower that rose some three hundred feet. There were a few Protestant churches in the neighborhood, but they were very relatively small. Almost everyone he knew in the old neighborhood belonged to the Catholic church.

In this little town, the Methodist church was the largest church with the Episcopalian second. Then came a small Catholic church and an even smaller Lutheran church.

If it weren’t for the children, he would be living somewhere else, maybe on a lake or near the beach. Something close to the water. That’s the problem when you have children and get divorced. You want to run away and never see the other person again, but you have these children that need you, so you have to keep seeing the person who betrayed you over and over. Now he knew what people meant when they said their divorce was like an open wound that would not heal. On top of that, you have to try and communicate with the ex about how to handle issues with the children like schoolwork, health care and vacations. He

hated having to deal with the ex about these issues. She was difficult to deal with when they were married, and just as bad or worse now. The only good thing about the divorce was that he did not have to listen to her constant whining and disrespectful attitude towards him. In some ways he was better off not being around her.

Still, their little town was close to everything and very convenient. It was a true small town in the sense that you got to know a lot of people. You got to know your immediate neighbors through doing yard work and saying hello during your daily routine. You also met people through your children’s participation in school and town sports. They had known a

lot of people in town as a married couple and now that they were split-up, there was a lot of yours and mine with most of the friends being hers since she had been home all day and active in the community. He remembered how it was being married to her when it came to other couples in the community. He could tell that she was being critical of him to her married girlfriends. He guessed a lot of women bitched about their husbands to their friends. Some women took her seriously and he could sense it when he was in their company. A few seemed to be truly friendly, even sympathetic, so they must have seen through her to some extent.

Who knew what the folks in town were thinking about him now. Luckily, he was not around her friends much since he was mostly at work, coaching, or at home with the kids. Now, after the