On February 1, 1968, Eddie Adams photographed the execution of Nguyen Van Lam, a Viet Cong prisoner, his wrists tied behind his back, by Nguyen Ngoc Loam, Chief of Police for South Vietnam, on a street in Saigon—the bullet from the revolver to the temple of the prisoner at point blank range pulling his eyes shut in a squint of shock and warping the lips of his mouth in a grimace.
Enemy.
Fifteen minutes before Robert Kennedy was shot in the head, I had gone to bed, glad that he had won the California primary and cautiously hopeful that he could somehow begin to unite black and white and also soon negotiate an end to the terrible war. I was still groggy and had not yet begun to dress for work when Mr. Good called early the next morning.
"Have you heard about Kennedy?" he demanded.
"Yes," I said, thinking my friend referred to the victory over McCarthy in the presidential primary.
"What do you think?" he insisted.
"I think he'll win."
"Win?" my friend exclaimed. "He's not even expected to live!"
"Oh."
Without asking I knew then what must have happened. I clicked on the television and saw him, unconscious, lying helpless on his back on the floor, his eyes rolled back into his head from the hot bullet to his brain.
My heart turned to lead.
To me it felt like everybody was getting shot. At almost every class meeting, it seemed, students demanded that at least a few minutes be devoted to discussion of the war and the draft and the disproportionate toll it took on the young, the poor, and the black.
Late one afternoon at the end of the spring semester one year later I had posted on the wall outside my office the final grades in my course in American literature and then joined a colleague of mine in the English department and his wife at their upstairs apartment for drinks and dinner and for brandy and marijuana after. It was almost midnight when his doorbell rang. David walked downstairs to see who it was and then came back up and said a student of mine wanted to see me. It was Philip, a boy to whom I had given a D, mainly because he had written so few words—hardly a paragraph in his tiny, tidy feminine script—in answer to each of the essay questions I had asked on not just the final but on all of the tests I had given in the course. I hadn't known how to grade Philip. He was neither lazy nor stupid. His essay answers were simply just not long enough. Philip was a big young man, six two two thirty I'd say, but chubby and soft. He stood in the dim light and dark, I just inside the aluminum storm door, and we spoke through the screen.
"Yes?" I inquired.
"If I really got a D," he said nervously, "I am either going to kill you or kill myself."
Though Philip seemed serious and solemn, he did not appear menacing, and I did not feel frightened. His final grade had been one of several that I had stewed over. Based mainly upon short papers and essay answers on tests, grades were almost entirely my subjective opinion.
The war was constantly in my thoughts.
"I'll raise your grade," I told him.
"Thank you."
I didn't see Philip again until the following Christmas. He called to me one day as I was walking on campus and I stopped and waited. Philip said that he had failed all of his other classes that spring and that in spite of my generosity he had indeed flunked out and been drafted. But Philip had failed his physical and he was back on campus now only to visit old friends. He apologized for having threatened me as he had and he insisted that he had not really meant it.
"I still appreciate what you did for me," Philip said.
"Forget it."
No comments:
Post a Comment