*Featured image courtesy of KaraSuva on Pixabay.com*
I cross the street to the main campus that shows off its New Hampshire beauty as if it were posing for the cover of Yankee Magazine. The grass, green from spring rain and freshly mowed, slopes to buildings bathed in sunlight. Students walk in and out of Murkland and Hamilton Smith Halls carrying armloads of books. I read the inscription on the façade of the library that I’d read so many times as an undergrad. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
When I go into the library, the dizzying stripes of its carpet remind me that this isn’t 1964 and that my now graduate student self has learned to ask “Whose truth?” UNH is a different place. Gone is the concept of in loco parentis, gone are the rules that require freshmen, women only, to be back to their dorms by nine during the week and eleven on weekends. Gone is the innocence where freshmen would wear a required beanie until Thanksgiving, gone is the attempt to retrieve a beanie placed on top of a greased flagpole, gone is the choice to write about the efficacy of the freshmen beanie on our first essays. The world changed when Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson ordered the first bombings of Vietnam. The world changed for me when I married an Air Force pilot and moved onto Pease Air Force Base.
Ever since I returned to the university in the awful ’68 spring semester, truth and freedom seem like chimeras. If the class I teach isn’t canceled because of a bomb threat, the graduate classes I’m taking might be. First came the Tet Offensive, then the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, then the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. A year ago when news of the 1968 My Lai Massacre surfaced, the protests began again. I’ve learned to hide my anti-war feelings on the Base and to hide my connection to the Base from my students. Things seem quieter now that the decade has turned to 1970 and the draft lottery has begun. I feel a new spirit of calm, of a belief that the United States will soon extricate itself from the war.
I walk past the library’s checkout counter and shake off the vertigo I feel when I look at the carpet. Not even a year old and it’s already become a campus joke. I find the stairs that lead to the PS 3515 row and pull down a copy of The Sun Also Rises. The quote I need jumps off the page in Chapter 4. “Don’t we pay for all the things we do?” Lady Brett Ashley says to her lover who’s been made impotent by this long ago war.
I want to work the quote into today’s discussion of Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home.” The topic, war and peace, and the plight of a soldier returned home to a world he doesn’t recognize. Jack is like him. The lone veteran in the class, he’s returned from Vietnam and seems like some foreign body who’s gained entrance by mistake. His buzz cut hair and military posture separates him from the long hair and tie-dye shirts most of the male students wear as they slouch at their desks. His difference would be okay if he hadn’t chosen to undercut half the ideas other students propose. More than once I’ve had to caution him about giving everyone a voice. Jack’s defense of America’s role in Vietnam is clear and the tension in the classroom palpable.
I look at my watch. 2:30, enough time to get to my office and read the last few student essays I need to finish before class. A voice behind me says “Joohdy.” Jack. The only one in class who refuses to call me “Judith.” When he says “Joohdy,” he sounds like a bully on a playground. I wish the changes of the sixties hadn’t happened, that students still called professors Doctor and professors called students Mister or Miss instead of by their first names. But Judith I am to everyone in class except Jack.
“Joohdy,” he says again when I turn to face him. “I went to your office and you weren’t there.”
“My office hours don’t start for another half hour.”
Jack moves too close. He’s tall, muscular, neatly dressed in khakis and the kind of polo shirt he always wears to class. Though he looks clean, I can smell something like damp earth, as if he’s been sleeping in the woods or still carries in his pores the memory of Vietnam’s jungles.
I step backwards, watching his face. It’s blank, affectless, the face of someone who’s shielded himself from the world. “What do you want to see me for?”
“Soldier’s Home.”
“You can skip class if the story upsets you.”
“Just want to remind you that I’m a soldier home. You and all those anti-American students.”
“They aren’t anti-American. They protest because they care about people like you.”
“They hate people like me. You don’t like me either, Joohdy.” He steps closer.
I move toward the shelves. “You know that’s not fair.”
He follows. “I’ll walk with you.”
“I’m meeting someone downstairs. I’ll see you in class.” I shelve the book, walk through the stacks to the opposite aisle, and go into the ladies room, telling myself I’m not afraid. I use the toilet and wash my hands. Two students come into the ladies room. I wait and leave with them. Jack is gone.
Outside the library, I listen to the three o’clock chimes sounding from T-Hall. I turn left and start up the steps into Murkland before I remember that after my undergraduate days, the English Department moved to Hamilton Smith. Jack isn’t the only one who returned to a changed world. I turn around and go down the hill to the office I share with Sandra. Sandra never comes to campus on Friday afternoons, but Tony Maynard might be in his office across the hall. When I knock on his door, no one answers. I tell myself again that I’m not afraid.
I unlock my door and leave it open to the empty hallway, then pick up the two papers I have left to read. The first one is better than I expect. Maybe I’ve taught my students something this semester. I breath deeply before I picked up the last one. Jack’s. His papers are usually excellent. This paper surprises me with its convoluted argument that war is necessary for peace, that there’s a right side and a wrong side, and that the right side never commits war crimes. I make a few comments in the margins about confusing sentences. Finally, I write only a provocative comment at the end of the paper. “If only the wrong side commits war crimes, what does My Lai tell us about the United States?”
I’m marking a C on Jack’s paper when I look up to see Nancy Caldwell at my door. With a Ph.D. in rhetoric, Nancy is the first woman professor the English Department has hired. I wish she and the two other women faculty now in the Department had been around when I was an undergraduate. Some changes are good.
“Got a minute?” says Nancy.
“Of course. I just finished reading the last student paper.” I put Jack’s paper on top of the pile.
Nancy sits in the chair I use for students when they come for a conference. She looks at the top paper. “Jack Logan. How’s he doing?”
“Usually well. Not on this paper.”
“Tony Maynard told me about him this morning. That’s why I’m here.”
“Is Jack one of his students?”
“No. Jack’s only a freshman. But Tony has seen him for the last two weeks standing by your door muttering to himself. This morning he asked for his name. Told him you didn’t come in until the afternoon. Wondered if he could help.”
“Jack found me in the library. He’s worried about the story we’re discussing today. ‘Soldier’s Home.'”
“Hemingway?”
“Yes. Jack just got back from Vietnam. He hates all the anti-war demonstrations and how the other students in class don’t defend the United States. I told him he could skip class if it bothered him.”
“Maybe he will. After I talked with Tony, I contacted the counseling office. They’ve no record of him. You might suggest their service if he’s having trouble adjusting. If he comes in for a conference with you, keep your door open.”
“I always keep it open when students come in.” I wish I had office hours earlier in the day when more people are around.
“If Jack causes any trouble in class, as head of the writing program, I can intervene. Meantime, be careful.”
“I don’t think he’s dangerous. He’s like Krebs in Hemingway’s story. Out of place in an America that’s changed.”
“It must be hard for Vets,” says Nancy, glancing at her watch. “Guess we’d both better get to class. I’m a junior professor. Just like you, I get to teach at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Do your students come?”
“They do.”
“They must like you. Ask for help if you need it.” Nancy leaves me alone to think about Jack.
I pick up his paper, turn to my comment, and add, “Your argument, despite its uncharacteristic style lapses, challenges me, as always, to think.” I added a plus to the C, pick up my things and lock my door. As I go down the stairs to class, I listen to the four notes of the T-Hall chimes. Like the façade on the library, the notes haven’t changed.
Twenty students greet me from desks arranged in a half circle facing the front of the room. “Can we get our papers at the beginning of class?” asks one.
“You know the answer to that,” I say. “The papers were some of the best of the semester, but you’ll have to wait.”
Jack sits in a back corner, his fingers tapping on a desk that boasts years of student graffiti. I want to put my hands on his to stop the tapping. I open the discussion with a question that evokes my own feelings about a changing world. “What in the text tells us that Krebs returns to a place he no longer feels is his home?”
The students easily analyze. They see how Krebs came back to a place finished with World War I, a place where no one wants to hear more gruesome war stories. Without the intensity of war and barely in his twenties, he’s a caricature of the old soldier, masking the fear he felt in battle and the loneliness he feels among those who haven’t been to war. They point out his ways of escaping––sleeping late, reading, eating alone, playing pool or music on his clarinet. They notice the details of how the girls’ hairstyles have changed, how Krebs thinks finding a girlfriend would be too complicated after the easy sex available with French and German girls he met during the war and whose language he didn’t speak. Typical Hemingway misogyny, though I don’t point this out.
When a student says that being allowed to drive his father’s car won’t replace what Krebs has lost, I follow up. “What, exactly, has Krebs lost?”
Answers fly around the room. “Ambition.” “Love.” “Religious faith.” “Belief in country.” “Innocence.”
Jack remains silent until Larry, the student whose anti-war stance is the strongest says, “Krebs fought at the Argonne. I looked it up. Over 550 Americans were isolated in the forest. Over half were killed or taken prisoner. They should never have gone in there. Kind of like My Lai, right Jack?”
I stop him. “The Americans were the ones attacked at the Argonne. No civilians were involved the way they were at My Lai.”
Jack speaks for the first time. “What’s My Lai?”
“Where the hell have you been?” says Larry. “It was all over the news last year. American soldiers killing Vietnamese women and children. A massacre.”
Jack stands up from his desk and looks down on Larry. “You’re lying,” he says before he sits down again.
Linda, a quiet student who at the beginning of the semester seemed attracted to Jack, defends him. “Jack was in Vietnam.”
“All the more reason to hear about My Lai,” says Larry.
“We only got news from The Stars and Stripes,” says Jack. “I knew before I left that there were war protests, but we never heard about them. Too busy fighting for people like you.”
“And killing babies like Calley did. They should have convicted his whole platoon.”
I redirect the class. “Let’s get back to the story. Here’s a quote from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. ‘Don’t we pay for all the things we do?’ Is Krebs paying for things he’s done? Should he be? Remember, this is World War I.”
The discussion continues about the goals of World War I and the hints that Krebs exaggerates the atrocities. I tell them about Hemingway’s role as an ambulance driver, his distance from the heat of battle, and his disillusion with the war after it was over. When the clock reads 4:45, I’m relieved to end class and return the papers.
Jack looks at his grade and leaves the room. When the last student with a question is gone, I go to my car and drive to Pease, hating where I’m forced to live with other wives whose husbands are flying tanker planes or bombers. I want to live in Durham and become part of the peace demonstrations. Peace, not Pease.
###
When I arrive on campus Monday, a crowd has gathered in front of T-Hall. I recognize Larry in the group of protestors. “Class starts in five minutes. Will you be there?”
“No one will be. This is big. Our protests will turn the war now. Get us out of Vietnam.”
“What happened?”
“You haven’t heard?” says Larry. “Hiding yourself from the truth? Just like Jack does?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Kent State.”
I look at the crowd. Whatever happened has mobilized UNH. “What happened at Kent State?”
“National Guard shot four students. News is just coming out and already we’ve got two hundred people here and a movement to boycott classes.”
I can see the entrances to Ham-Smith, Murkland, the library. Larry’s right. Normally there’d be a sea of students and faculty moving in and out of the buildings as the three o’clock classes are ending and the four o’clock ones about to begin. “This makes no sense. What were they doing to get shot?”
“Protesting. Peacefully. We can’t let Nixon draft another hundred and fifty thousand of us so he can invade Cambodia.”
I clutch my story anthology as if it were armor against the fury descending upon UNH. The T-Hall chimes sound. I moved away from the crowd and into Ham-Smith. If any students are in class, I’ll dismiss them, go back to my car, drive some place quiet to listen to news I find too disturbing to turn on before I teach.
I walk fast, breathing heavily when I get to my classroom. Only Jack is there. He’s slouched at a desk. Before I can announce that there will be no class, he stands up. “I checked it,” he says.
I wait, listening for anyone in the hallway I can call if Jack approaches me. Unlike in the library, he stays distant. “My Lai,” he says. “They never told us. I saw things. Bad things. Nothing like My Lai.”
I search for something to say. “Your war is over. We have counselors. They can help you.”
“It’s too late, Judith.” He leaves the room, slamming the door behind him.
On Wednesday, the news cycle is still full of conflicting information about what happened at Kent State. The students had become violent. The National Guard shot in self-defense. The National Guard shot into a crowd of peaceful students. One student had simply been walking to her class. I could have recited the names of the dead. Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder.
Students are talking in groups near a spot on the grass that I can see has burned. A few campus police keep them away from the area they cordoned off. Something has happened. The air doesn’t smell right. Instead of the clean smell of grass, it smells of the bonfire students must have started to protest the war. It smells of the cauterized flesh I remember when I had a mole removed from my face. Only stronger.
I hurry past the area into the classroom. Students are standing in front of the chalkboard or looking out the window instead of sitting in their usual seats. Linda stops me before I reach my desk. “I should have known. I saw him in the MUB this morning.”
“What are you talking about? Saw who?”
“Jack,” says Linda. “He was babbling about Hemingway and Krebs and My Lai and monks who self-immolated.”
I step further into the room. The students move away from the window, letting in a faint odor of burnt flesh. The ones in front of the chalkboard give me space to read the words Jack had written.
We pay for all the things we do.
Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived and taught in before moving to Oregon. Although she has given up writing scholarly books that require footnotes, she incorporates much of her academic research as background in her mysteries. She is the author of three Susan Warner mysteries, three Deborah Strong mysteries, and a collection of stories called Six Old Women and Other Stories. Her novel Leaving Freedom was reissued on June 14, 2023 along with a sequel Finding Freedom. Dean continues to write about New England while she is discovering the beauty of the West.
For more information, see https://sharonldean.com/
