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“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” - Leonard Cohen
My google drive is a scary graveyard of drafts. Stuff I wrote all through college and after and then never touched again. I don’t like haunting myself reading old manuscripts. It fills me with a acidic stomachache of dread because I never took the time to edit and refine.
When I do read back on stories I wrote between 18-26ish, I am grossed out (cringe-d?) by how serious I was. It’s a weird archive of my idea of what life is- what life was. Now, I feel as if living is a lot sillier. A lot happier. A lot stranger.
I don’t want to be Hemingway anymore. I want writing to feel like dancing.
All that being said- I wrote something years ago about my dad’s time in the Air Force that I still value a lot. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit after discussions on what it means to support veterans and our troops.
The story I wrote then was heartbreakingly sad and that was my goal. I talked about how I dream my dad’s nightmares. How I feel like I’m in the cargo space of a C130 when I am lost and scared- banging on the metal interior, watching men around me motion sick and throwing up. I wrote full of ache and guilt for what my dad experienced in while stationed in Thailand at the end of the Vietnam war.
But my dad doesn’t have nightmares. And when I sat across from him last week, bored on a cruise ship, talking about airplanes, he laughed.
He stories are mostly joyous. The connotation of what he was doing, fixing gunships (he was an environmental aircraft control specialist), making sure they were in tip top shape to fly over Vietnam and rain down bread loaf sized bullets at about 1800 rounds per minute is fucking terrifying and existential.
But he laughed when he told me that the magnetic detectors in the gunship’s artillery followed him across the hangers because he was wearing a metal belt buckle.
All this time sitting in front of laptops and paper and I still haven’t totally figured out what I want my narrative voice to be. I know now, that it is not serious. And I believe, much like Hemingway, that we must write hard and clear about what is true. But I also want my writing to be a pure symbiotic connection to my inner gooey soul. And my soul laughs a lot, too. It thinks everything, even war, can have light.
The only way I know how to keep working through question of “voice” I’m posing to myself is to keep writing and reading. It’s the only way. Keep talking and feeling things.
So I want to tell you a quick story that my dad told me the other night on the cruise ship that I some how didn’t know (dads really do be dropping intense life altering stories randomly).
The only time my dad set foot in Vietnam during the war was after Nixon said is was over. A C130 was flown back to Saigon to pick up the bodies of POWs, and C130s always had to fly with their crew in case something went wrong, so my dad was there.
The cheaply constructed wooden caskets lined the cargo hold. 8-12 stacked on top of each other on either side. My dad and the crew were packed between them.
They landed at a base in between the trip (like a layover I guess?) . Well the pressurization light started going off and blinking in the middle of the night and needed examining before it took off again the next morning. It was my dad’s job to fix it. So at 2am he headed by himself into a dark hanger- echoing with spookiness- with a flash light and his gear to check it out.
He sat in the cockpit and messed around (I could potentially research what he did in these moments but...not the point) pressurizing the plane and making sure it held pressure and it did. Good!
But the next thing he needed to do was go through the cargo hold to the back of the plane and make sure that the doors and knobs and shit (??) were secure and no air was leaking out.
My sweet father, who LOVES horror movies, obsessively reads Stephen King, and swears by the ghostly visits of his younger years, slowly turned around in the cockpit with his flashlight so that he was shining one straight light beam down the length of the cargo hold. Then and only then did he remember that he was not alone and that he was accompanied by dozens of dead bodies. Only separated from him by thin cedar and air.
He said “no fuckin’ way” and signed off on the safety check without checking the back of the plane and ran right out of that hanger.
Luckily the plane was all good and he did most of the safety check when he was in the cockpit. The bodies of those POWs made it to their final destination and it is now just a story my dad tells.
He tells it now and he laughs. It is gruesome and horrible and macabre and profound and he laughs. I love him for that.
I find myself reading through the icky graveyard of Google Drive drafts today and I laugh. I am happy to be changing. To still be finding my voice.
Happy to be thinking and knowing that life is so scary and we laugh. So full of trauma and we are still laughing. So full of dark turns and we are light.
***side note: If you know me and my family, we are very anti-war, anti-death and destruction. I don’t want to write about this stuff to glorify our country’s military past or anything (duh) but more so to just tell the truth. My dad entered the Air Force because he didn’t have money for college. He is a veteran that deserves to be protected and respected like many many many others in our country. And we must remember that while we (liberal, privileged, 21st century kids), do not support war, it has always and always will be the vulnerable, not the rich, who fight for us.
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my dad remembers the craziest stories detail for detail from his younger years but forgets his gmail password every single day.
This is wonderful Casey. Your voice comes through. Tell your dad thanks for his service and the laughs.