Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Patience and Alice were standing in the crowd of wives who were greeting their men. I went to her and we hugged. We kissed our official greeting kiss. I followed her to the table she and Alice had prepared for us. This being their third visit, they now knew the ropes—the ins and outs of visiting your man at Eglin. They had brought in a big bowl of fresh fruit, half a dozen croissants, yogurt, instant Bustelo coffee, and more, and that was just for breakfast. Patience showed me the new freezer chest she’d bought, inside of which were the makings of a gourmet lunch.

The sight of all this plenty was both heartening and depressing. I like this kind of food—it was just that it offered the contrast that I was able to avoid when I was in camp tending Dorm Four. Here in the visiting room, the fact that I was a prisoner in a prison—whose wife worked cleaning houses to support herself and our son (she had not yet gotten enough of the money I’d made on the book to quit) and drove two hundred miles and camped out in a tent at a nearby campground—was obvious. It made the punishment all the more painful.

After coffee and a croissant, Patience and I went outside and walked laps on the concrete path around the yard. I told her of my adventures as keeper of the grounds around Dorm Four, which she took to be funny.

Patience told me how nice everyone was back in High Springs. We’d wondered how the people of High Springs, a small (population five thousand) rural southern town, would react to the news that I was a convicted drug smuggler—and had been walking, unknown as such, among them for two years. It turned out they were very supportive. One man told me, just before I’d left for prison, that I shouldn’t worry. “Hell, Bob, there’s a lot of people in this town made their living making moonshine. People understand about pot. You don’t have to worry about nothing.” Another man, Bob Ryan, who operated the country store up the road from us, sent this message with Patience: “Tell Bob I’m feeling real safe now; knowing he’s up there in prison and not able to sneak into my house some night while I’m asleep and stuff one of them marijuana cigarettes in my mouth.” Patience told me she’d met a couple—Mike Costello, a Vietnam veteran, and his wife, Patti Street, who had been one of Jack’s teachers. Mike had written a novel about Vietnam called A Long Time from Home, which he was in the process of getting published. She told me Mike was cutting firewood for her so she’d be ready for winter. Patience had passed a petition around town, which hundreds of people signed, and sent it to Judge Sol Blatt, asking him to give me an alternative sentence.

In conjunction with the petitions, we had hired (with the extra advance from Viking against my royalties) a group known as the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA), which was preparing an appeal of my sentence to the judge. In support of their work, people—readers and friends from all over the country—were sending hundreds of letters to the NCIA, which would be submitting them to Judge Blatt. The goal of NCIA was to have me released to work in my community as an alternative to incarceration—there are Dorm Fours in every community. Tom Wolfe, the chief of police of High Springs, even wrote a letter saying he’d watch over me personally, make sure I did my work.

I had not much hope in the success of this appeal, and the fact that so many people supported me was both exhilarating and heartbreaking. I’d never had so many friends in my life. I was guilty as hell and paying the price. I did not believe I deserved to be helped.

We walked slow laps around the short path, Patience clinging to me like I was going to be snatched away any second. I was feeling miserable. I had come to some kind of adjustment, a balance with myself about being in prison that this walk was upsetting. “Patience. Do you realize that if you keep coming up here every other week, we’ll have to go through this at least fifty times?”

“How do you know? You haven’t even seen the parole board yet. And the NCIA petition, you don’t know how that will work, either.”

“True, I don’t know anything for sure, but I have a strong feeling about it. Everybody here figures he shouldn’t be here. And they’re probably right. If God considered each person’s whole life and compared it with the fuckup that got him here, most of these guys wouldn’t be here. But that’s not how it works. I’m going to get the standard two years, what they give people who smuggle three thousand pounds of pot. They don’t care if I’m a nice guy and this is my first crime.”

Patience nodded. “We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll come see you every other week.”

“Patience, having you come here is killing me. I hate the visiting room. It’s like a fucking bus station—no, it’s worse; it’s like waiting in a dentist’s office for two days with one Elks magazine. It took me three days to get over the last visit.”