54 Listening

I worked tirelessly to promulgate what I thought I had learned about Buddhism. In the evenings I loitered in the three village taverns hoping to make conversation about the Way. The college had started a correspondence degree program aimed at government and military personnel. They were required to attend a short summer residency in Reunion to complete their degree and often I saw them drinking beer and just hanging out. By this time I had a local reputation both good and bad. One night a man about my age approached me as I sipped a beer and surveyed the scene.

"Are you Bob Skank?" he asked.

"Yes."

"You don't know me," he said, "but I know you."

"Okay."

The man told me his name.

"Hello."

We shook hands.

"I've heard of your interest in war and I want to tell you a story," the man said.

I nodded.

"All you have to do is listen."

I nodded.

"You don't have to say anything."

"Okay."

He explained that he was a veteran of the war in Vietnam and that he had been a spotter for an artillery unit.

"Are you familiar with military terminology?" he asked.

"Not really."

He explained that a spotter was a man who looked through binoculars at the artillery target and reported results. One day his unit had been told to fire on a small village hooch from which enemy gunfire had been reported. The soldier had been a spotter for eight months.

He had never seen a direct hit.

"This day I did."

He made circles of his thumbs and index fingers and put them to his eyes as if he were holding field glasses and he slowly elevated them as he raised his gaze forty-five degrees.

"I watched body parts rise," he said, "legs, arms, heads."

I listened.

"Up, up, up, up, up—"

I waited.

"Till they peaked and in slow motion began to fall back down."

His hands still at his eyes he slowly lowered his gaze until it was level again.

"Then they stopped."

He paused.

"They hung there in midair frozen in space."

I was silent.

"That's all I remember," he told me. "I woke up in an army psych hospital."

He waited.

"I appreciate your telling me this," I told him. "Thank you."

"There's more."

"Yes?"

He had been in the hospital for one month, he said, and when he was pronounced cured and again ready for duty he was sent back to finish his tour as spotter for the same unit.

"The hell I experienced those three months was so terrible," he said, "I won't even try to describe it."

He had returned to his wife and home and job in New York City, he said, and he believed he had adjusted well to normal civilian life. He knew he had experienced trauma but somehow he had survived and he felt that he had recovered. Then one day he worked long at the office and arrived home several hours late. When he entered the apartment he found no dinner ready, as he had come to expect, and the house a mess. He and his wife had had their troubles, he said, but nothing unusual. He thought that they had moved forward and, considering everything he had been through, that they had been doing quite well.

He loved her.

Annoyed, he called his wife's name and when she did not answer he pushed open the door to the bedroom and found her there lying on her back in bed with the covers up to her neck.

"Jesus Christ!"

He walked angrily to the bed.

"I'm working my butt off while you sleep all goddamned day?"

His wife remained silent.

"Damn you!"

He saw fear in her eyes.

"Bitch!"

He grabbed the covers, he said, and he yanked.

"Her arms were crossed over her chest," he said. "Like this."

His forearms made an x.

"She had a pistol in one hand and a big kitchen knife in the other."

His wife trembled and cried.

He realized instantly, he said, how frightening, how dangerous, how menacing he must have appeared to her. He said he stared for a few seconds. He let the reality of it sink in.

Then he turned around and walked out.

"For good."

I remained silent.

No words.

"Thank you for telling me," I said finally.

The man smiled.

"Thank you for listening," he said.

I smiled.

"Sure."

We shook hands.

He wandered back over to a friend.

I scanned the tavern for somebody to tell what this stranger had just told me.

Jesus!

What I felt I had learned about nonviolence and honesty was to me still so unpredictable and so thrilling that at moments like these I felt I had the keys to save the world.

I thought it was Buddhism.

No.

It was bigger than that.