Bobby Ann Mason’s famous first novel, In Country, explored the public reaction to the Vietnam War and its veterans in the mid 1980s. The novel’s protagonist, Sam, is a 15 year old girl whose father was killed in the war. In this excerpt from the end of the novel, Sam makes a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. to visit the Vietnam War Memorial with her grandmother, mama, and her uncle Emmett, who was also a veteran.
Here, take the camera, Sam, get his name. Mama has brought Donna’s Instamatic. No, I can’t take a picture this close. Sam climbs the ladder until she’s eye level with her father’s name. She feels funny, touching it and scratching on a rock. Writing something for future archeologists to puzzle over. Clues to a language. Look, this way, Sam. Mama says I want to take your picture.
I want to get you and his name and the flowers. And together, if I can. Then I show up. Sam says. Smile. How can I smile? She’s crying. Mama backs up and snaps two pictures. Sam feels her face looking blank up on the ladder. She feels so tall, like a spindly weed that is sprouting up out of this diamond bright seam of hard earth.
She sees Emmet at the directory, probably searching for his buddies names. She touches her father’s name again. All I can see here is my reflection. Mama says when Sam comes down the ladder, I hope his name shows up. And her face was all shadow. Wait here a minute. Sam says, turning away her tears from mama. She hurries to the directory on the east side.
Emmett isn’t there anymore. She sees him striding along the wall, looking for a certain panel nearby. A group of Marines is keeping a vigil for the P.O.W., and misses. A double row of flags, is planted in the dirt alongside their table. One of the Marines walks by with a poster. You are an American. Your voice can make the difference.
Sam flips through the directory and finds Hughes. She wants to see her father’s name there, too. She runs down the row of whose names there were so many. Hughes boys killed. Names she doesn’t know. His name is there, and she gazes at it for a moment. Then suddenly her own name leaps out at her. Sam Allen Hughes PFC oh 2nd March 4902.
February 67th. Houston, Texas 14. A one off for her heart pounding. She rushes to panel 14 E! And after raising her eyes over the string of names for a moment, she locates her own name, Sam a Hughes. It is the first on a line. It is down low enough to touch. She touches her own name. How odd. It feels as though all the names in America have been used to decorate this wall.
Mama is there at her side, clutching at Sam’s arm, digging in with her fingernails. Mama says, coming up on this wall all of a sudden and seeing how black it was. It was so awful. But then I came down in it and saw that white carnation blooming out of that crack, and it gave me hope. It made me know who’s watching over us.
She loosens her bird claw grip. Did we lose Emmett? Silently, Sam points to the place where Emmett is studying the names low on a panel. He is sitting there cross-legged in front of the wall, and slowly his face bursts into a smile like flames.
In the early 1980s, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was, getting together. And I think, a lot of voices were emerging out of the war and about the war. I was writing the book, and so the characters were very much in my head. And the day I went to Washington, I won a very much to see the memorial as I was walking there from the Washington Monument or the Capitol.
It was pouring down rain, and all the way there I could hear my characters talking as if they were going. I knew what they would say, and I know what they’d be looking for. then I had a sense of what they might be feeling. So I, I experienced the visit, 2 or 3 different levels. The way they were seeing it, the way I was seeing it, the way America was seeing it.
And as for the last scene where Sam finds her own name on the wall, I found my own name on the wall. It was a guy’s name. It was Bobby with a y Bobby G. Mason. That visit to the wall. And especially finding my own name made me feel that it was my story as much as anyone. Story that it was every American story.
Tags: Fiction