Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I unlocked my locker and got out my big radio and the earphones. I hung the radio on a hook on the partition above the head of my cot. I had made the hook with coat-hanger wire so the radio was up high enough to get the PBS station in Pensacola.

The loudspeaker called an inmate to the control room. That meant a urine test. It was random. They called up two or three men every night. Some of the inmates who had been here a few years said the piss tests really cut down on the pot smoking. Not like the good old days, they said, when the guys had parties in the woods next to Dorm Five where Tarzan fell out of the tree.

I listened to the radio no matter what I was doing. Sometimes I answered mail. I was getting about fifty letters a week from readers, most of whom, I was surprised to know, weren’t Vietnam veterans. I read them all, and tried to answer them, too, but I was falling behind. I got a thousand letters from readers while I was at Eglin.

Sometimes ideas for new inventions popped into my mind, and I made drawings. I sent an attorney friend of mine, Tony LoPucki, in Gainesville, my idea for a quartz wristwatch that didn’t need batteries. LoPucki, who used to be a patent attorney, liked my ideas, but he thought the world was doing okay using batteries in their watches. Fine. The only reason LoPucki talked to me at all was that when I first met him, I showed him my scheme for three-dimensional television. I got the idea looking at the display of a quartz wristwatch, oddly enough. I’d experimented with 3-D movies in New York. I exposed single frames of a still life in an 8mm movie camera, moving the camera left or right for each frame. I projected this film and tried looking at it through a spinning disk with one hole near the edge. The idea was that if the disk spun at the right speed, then my left eye would see a left image in one frame of my film, and then, if everything was timed right, my right eye would see the next frame, a right image. Persistence of vision, I figured, would create a 3-D picture. I mounted the disk on a hand drill, and by varying the speed, I got it to work. But I couldn’t figure an easy way to synchronize the disk with the flickering left and right images. The blinking seconds on the liquid crystal display of a watch gave me an idea: Wear glasses with liquid-crystal lenses. Then send a signal from the TV to the glasses, and the lenses could be switched alternately from opaque to clear in synch with the thirty images per second on the TV screen. I had no idea how to build something like this, so I sat on the idea for a year before I met LoPucki. LoPucki was going to Washington anyway, so he said he’d do a search free, because he knew I was poor. He came back very impressed. The idea was patented, yes, but only three months before. I didn’t know where these ideas came from, but they weren’t coming tonight.

I decided to read. I selected a book out of the dozen or so I had on the shelf over the built-in desk. I picked out The First Circle, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

I’d finished At Play in the Fields of the Lord, by Peter Matthiessen, a book Bill Smith sent me. Smith had been sending me books to improve my essentially illiterate background. So had Larry Heinemann. Heinemann sent me Life on the Mississippi because he said I wrote like Samuel Clemens. Heinemann was gracious as hell. At Play was stunning, and I wondered how Matthiessen ever got to be so smart. His writing is like poetry, every page of it. The book was written in 1965, while I was living in a pup tent in Vietnam. I missed it, though I probably wouldn’t have read it had Bill not sent it. At Eglin, in addition to the technical books I read—layman physics stuff about fundamental particles, black holes, artificial intelligence, computers, and so on—I read a lot of novels, hoping that some of what makes writing a novel possible would rub off on me.

I put on my headphones and tuned in the classical music station. That made the rumble and rush of the crowded dorm fade to the background. I read.

The irony of The First Circle, for me, was that it took place in a sharashka, a minimum-security prison in Russia. I got lost in the life of Nerzhin and the other well-educated inmates of the sharashka because Solzhenitsyn made me feel I was there with them. Naturally, you can’t learn how to create stories like Solzhenitsyn or Matthiessen do by copying their writing techniques, but you can see grace in action and learn a few nuts and bolts about how they handle the mechanics of the presentation. All it took was time to do careful reading. I had plenty of time. I was now around day three hundred and ninety. I had another two hundred and ten to go. Lots of time.

Just before ten, the guys who’d been watching television came wandering back from the TV room to be in their cubes for the count. I put my book away and turned out my desk lamp.