What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?
By Chris Lombardi

what did you do in the war, daddy?

Not a question we were taught to ask in my faculty-brat elementary school. In this new place most fathers hadn't gone, they'd stayed home and protested, their children and tenure in tow. In those years, in my mother Leigh's academic circles, you didn't go to war, you hadn't gone, people like my father Nick Rossi didn't really exist, pulled out of college at twenty years old and sent to a place you'd never heard of.

I don't know if my father had flashbacks, but I do know he had insomnia, which worsened when Asia was in the news.

Is that why I came to Asia to die? Is there some strand braiding the war, my father's rage and insomnia, and me at the top of a Vietnamese mountain called Nui Ba Den? If so, the knot was tied securely and concretely in 1979: the year Vietnam invaded Cambodia, the year I began to have my own insomnia, the year the war that had brought me into being took my father from me.

That year piles of skulls and killing fields filled newspapers and there I was on my father's lap, looking at the National Geographic and pointing at a photo of Angkor Wat. "Daddy, I want to go there."

"Oh sweetheart," Nick said gently, "they're still fighting there.... Besides, it's dangerous, with all those land mines."

"Land mines?" I don't remember now what those words implied for me then, odd meaningless syllables. I was mostly listening for Nick's rage.

"Little... bombs. They get buried in the land so that when the other soldiers step on them, they blow up." Quickly, as if gagging on the last words, as if I could tell it wasn't only soldiers who exploded.

"What are you telling that child?" Leigh stepped between us with all the subtlety of a freight train. "She's moody enough, you could spare her the gory details of your war stories."

It didn't matter what he said or didn't, that summer a sort of melancholy filtered through the music of his saw and drill, his walk across the back lawn, his back bent over books, magazines, newspapers of many lands.

Was there some connection between Cambodia and what he had been in Asia to do? At that time I was too afraid to ask. His mood now was less terrifying than before but his capacity for quick anger still there, the loud rage that made my pulse race and my legs poise for flight.

what did you do in the war, daddy? still unspoken.

It was during that summer, when the melancholy filled the house and Leigh resolutely went about her business, that I became enamored with the young students who seemed to hurl themselves every semester from the mountains near Cornell. I called them the gorge angels. And it was that fall that Nick left us, pulled back to Brooklyn as if by a vaudevillian's cane, finally putting a stop to this bad performance of "Nick and Leigh: Happy in Ithaca." My mother responded by re-painting the house, converting Nick's shop to a well-lit office for herself, and signing me up for exercise class. "I'm beginning to worry about your weight."

Not that I ever showed up to a single class, not that she ever noticed, but it was her sideways way of not wanting me to share Nick's darkness. She was too late.

After the Cambodia revelations, Asia settled stubbornly on the back pages, for all of us. I saw my father for three weeks every summer and went to New York for the year-end Catholic holidays, the ones for which my mom had little patience. "Go, go, drown in incense and noise and the rest. Just make sure you get your homework done."

And in the flurry of all that, his new wife and their new baby, it was hard to detect the shadow of the long-ago war. I sometimes saw it during the mornings of our shared insomnia, his double-edged gift to me: we would meet in his kitchen at four a.m., the only time I saw him not surrounded by wife/mother/cousins/activity. "Judith! You get to bed!" he'd say, the edge in his voice so familiar it chased me back there, until twin Rossis stared at twin ceilings sharing/not sharing the dark night of the soul.

My first-ever suicide attempt was on one of those nights, the Christmas I was thirteen. I made my way into the spare bathroom -- the one that featured industrial-strength bottles of cold medicine, ammonia and aspirin. It was two days after Christmas and I was scheduled to go home the next day, to SnowLand Ithaca and Snow Princess Leigh and a pile of homework that sat like a pile of undigested food in my little backpack. The thought made me still, made me ill, not so much scared as slow. But I didn't want to stay in New York either, not unless I could stay right where I was this moment: not the joyous angry noise of the day but the ice-tinged 4 a.m. that was mine alone, that was Nick's, that held the shadow I feared and craved.

In a classic virgin attempt I tried the aspirin, swallowing about half the family-size bottle. I then went to bed and within a half hour was throwing up, a virgin's pain prolonged for about two hours.

Which meant that I was still throwing up when Nick and Annalisa officially rose. "Oh Bellina are you all right?"

I was able to stop between heaves long enough to say "Too many Christmas cookies, I think." I'd swallowed so many that my gut just returned the tiny cookies without hurting the stomach lining, no telltale bloodstains marking the casualty I had clearly intended to be. I was shipped on a slightly later bus than planned, otherwise the delivery we had promised my mother.

we've gotten away from the war.
or have we?

I didn't get to talk to Nick about the war until a new one came up, this one in the Persian Gulf. I was a very young newlywed working on my senior thesis, veteran of two or three more suicide attempts, finding my own brand of surcease in information about Chinese suicide, Indian Roman Pacific Islander suicide. It was then that I found statistics on U.S. veterans of the Vietnam war, whose suicide rates were impossibly high, with much argument about whether or not solo auto accidents counted as suicides. The studies were all old, within five or so years of the war, none looking for the inner time bomb that might have been set off ten or twenty years later.

Did anyone, I wondered, look for it during "Operation Desert Storm"?

A surreal set of fall and winter memories, the Zeitgeist producing a sort of disposable consumerist cross between World War II and Vietnam. The latter manifested in campus protests at Cornell: loud campus rallies with undergraduates shivering in snow, buses headed for Washington, D.C. filling up at midnight with students in down jackets and picket signs while the faculty crowd stayed home and argued in front of CNN. Some were passionately against the war; some, like my husband Mark Jacobsen, deeply ambivalent, fearing for Israel; others joined the rest of the nation in docile cheerleading.

"How's your dad feel about it?" Mark asked me one night, in bed after one such long drawn-out debate, both of us drowsy from red wine, eyes tearing from cigarette smoke.

"You know... I don't know."

"I wonder if this is tripping off any of his Vietnam stuff." With that land mine securely planted, Mark wrapped his arms around me and went to sleep.

I didn't. Were Annalisa and the kids getting the same treatment as we had during the fall of Saigon? Insomniac questions, added to the one brought on by the veteran suicide numbers. Had he ever sought the gorges himself?

I soon got my opportunity to ask some of it. I went down to do some research at the Columbia University library, and like a good Italian girl stayed not at a hotel but at my father's house.

His neighborhood, like most of New York, was as patriotic as the TV news; huge American flags and T-shirts with yellow ribbons. Certainly Annalisa and my stepsisters seemed enraptured by it all; I couldn't ask Nick about it over dinner. It had to wait for one of our 4 a.m. rendezvous, now that we could share the insomnia, could sip tea and brandy and watch the sun rise into bitter winter sky.

He didn't sleep much that week, and neither did I. I was drinking eight cups of coffee a day as I drowned in suicide lore at the library, then emerging to the shouts of demonstrations and the roar of Harlem police cars. Then I made my way through bitter ice down to Brooklyn, where over more coffee the whole family (including my grandmother and assorted cousins) watched the Pentagon's video games on TV. Somewhere in there the actual battles ground war started, to the New York Post's celebratory headline "KICKIN' BUTT!"

Despite the difference in terrain I saw Southeast Asia in Nick's face that week, though he didn't scream at my little sisters as he had at me, just stared and stared, a prisoner of 24-hour reporting. Finally one five-thirty morning, when our tea turned into the first cup of coffee, he opened his mouth.

"This ain't what it's about," he said, "this rah-rah show... these kids they know shit what they're getting into."

"This all bringing back memories for you?"

I knew the answer from his jaw, the way his hands gripped the back of his head, shoulders stretching, hands pulling at his still salt-and-pepper curls. "The desert is so different from the jungles, that part isn't... and all this bombing, we have no idea what it looks like on the ground. None. I saw bombed villages and little kids and old people as well as VC they all got hurt the same -- but part of their job was to hurt us so we had to hate them all the same, too." He looked down at his cigarette dying in an ashtray, as if the ashes could tell him something.

what did you do in the war, daddy?

I finally asked it, though in different words: "Were you in the south or the north?"

"Right in between, in the DMZ.... Sometimes my unit went south, sometimes north. It wasn't like this little movie. It was crazier, we were fighting everyone all at once."

"And you saw bombed villages?" And you bombed villages?

"Just like they're bombin' Baghdad now, we poured bombs all over that little country... it was crazy." He sighed and stood up, stretched his middle-aged body with a sort of adolescent shrug, a ghost of the teenage soldier he had been.

"Dad can I ask you a question?"

"Sure honey, anything."

"Did you know anyone from that time... who killed themselves?"

His expression said the words I was expecting, what kind of a question is that? but his answer far more measured, eyes still on the TV screen. "You mean during the war?"

"Or after," careful not to mention my reading right now.

"After is easy. You remember Paulie? He used to bring you donuts when you were real little, his parents ran a bakery on Long Island... you really loved their jelly donuts." He read the answer in my face, despite the jelly donuts, an easy memory trigger. "Yeah I guess you wouldn't, you were only two when he shot himself.... A lot of guys, they had memories they couldn't handle, or they had families callin' them all sorts of names, or else some fucking drug problem, do you call that suicide?"

"Sort of," a heroin addict with stripes on his shoulder and Vietnamese blood on his hands an odd cousin to Jack Kerouac, but it would do. "What about during the war?"

"Oh Jude, guys were dying all over the place—every once in a while it was his own gun right through the mouth. Their parents don't know, shit the command doesn't even know, except for the lieutenant who's thanking God it wasn't pointed straight at him." Nick drained his coffee with the vigor of a man polishing off a stiff drink. "You gonna put this in your paper?"

God, what a flip-side mirror image to the military suicides that usually bored me -- the samurai with their hara-kiri death-before-dishonor, ancient Chinese warlords dying to save their reputations in the face of defeat. These deaths felt more like a secret I was being asked to keep. "No Dad, I don't think so."

"Good." The word choked, one of the few times I ever saw Nick cry. "We were all so young. Did you know the average age over there was nineteen?"

"No, Nick, I didn't." Though I felt I should, suddenly, now.

what did you do in the war, daddy?
I survived.

That week ended, my research ended, and while from then on Nick felt freer to share assorted Southeast Asia memories (like the occasional Bangkok story), we never talked explicitly about the war again. I never learned what he actually did, what it felt like to kill someone, what or who inhabited his nightmares.

Or whether he ever saw Nui Ba Den, or considered leaping from its peak. But then, that was a question I would not have thought to ask him before I myself arrived here, trying to make my way toward some sort of home.

BACK TO

Click here to Visit our new publication,