Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

One Sunday night, after spending an hour agonizing over just what I should wear at the Salvation Army, I said, “Patience. What High Springs needs is a clothing room.”

“What?”

“You know. A place that does all your laundry and gives everybody uniforms. You wouldn’t have to worry if you were in style. The clothes would be cheaper. People would be a lot happier if they had a clothing room.”

Patience looked at me sadly and shook her head.

During July, John Tillerman showed up for his four-month halfway house. He, too, had to get a job, and he chose to be a free-lance carpenter. I hired him to help me finish the cabin. He put in wallboard upstairs, a cypress ceiling downstairs. I installed two air conditioners so our papers and books wouldn’t mildew.

On August 12, 1985, I was released from the halfway house to the custody of the parole office in Gainesville. I met my parole officer, Jack Gamble, at his office in the courthouse. He had been my pre-sentencing investigator, and was a fair man. He told me I couldn’t use drugs. I asked if that included alcohol and tobacco. He said those were fine. I said they kill a thousand times more people than all illegal drugs combined. Gamble nodded and said, “That may be true, but they’re legal.” He continued, saying I had to expect unannounced visits from him; I’d be free to travel anywhere I wanted, with permission. Everywhere except Central and South America. They were afraid I’d smuggle in another load, I guess. All I had to do on parole was submit a monthly statement saying I still lived at the same place and how much I earned that month. Again, the fact that I was paid only twice a year brought complaints from Mr. Gamble’s bosses. “Bob, it looks bad when you say you earned nothing for months at a time,” he said after I’d turned in three reports indicating zero income. When I got my royalty statement from Knox, I made a copy and sent it to Mr. Gamble. I’d made over a hundred thousand and I included a note saying; “In case anybody asks you why I don’t report a monthly income, show them this.” I wanted them to know that I was equally capable of being snotty.

I wrote about 150 pages of the second version of my robot book. I’d changed the whole story. I invented an undercover Russian agent to come to Florida (where the robot was built) to nab the machine. I thought it was pretty good; so did Patience. Knox sent a note back saying, “I just don’t get this, Bob.”

I was invited to give a reading in Chicago in June. Larry Heinemann had arranged it and invited us to stay with them. I was going to meet Larry for the first time and worried that we might not get along. I mean, he’d been wonderful and generous to me, writing to me in jail, sending me books, but what if he turned out to be an asshole in person?

Gamble gave me travel papers and we flew to Chicago, took a cab to Larry’s house. He came out wearing a baseball cap and said, “Welcome to Chicago, Bob. I’m glad you’re out of jail. We got rules here, too. Never pick a fight in a strange bar. Never cheer for the Yankees. And never, ever park your car in the same place twice.” We got along great. His wife, Edie, and Patience clicked, too.

Chicago was having a better-late-than-never welcome-home parade for Vietnam veterans. Neither Larry nor I wanted to go. The Chicago Sun-Times sent Tom Fitzpatrick over to get our feelings about the parade. When Fitzpatrick asked us if we were going, Larry said, “Nope. It’s just another fucking formation to me.”

I said, “Nope. Pilots don’t march.”

Patience was disgusted with us and made us go. “You don’t have to march,” she said. “Just watch. But go.”

We did, and I’m glad. It was heartwarming to see the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out to applaud and whistle and generally behave as though Vietnam vets weren’t losers after all. General Westmoreland gave a speech which Larry and I boycotted. Westmoreland, to me, was a fool whose strategy of attrition—killing people without taking territory—was responsible for that war lasting ten years and costing fifty-eight thousand American lives plus millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and even Thais. Now he was an old man and I just wanted to leave him alone. Heinemann said I was too kind, and held Westmoreland in such contempt that he probably would’ve choked him if they’d met.

Larry had just published his second book, Paco’s Story, which later won the National Book Award. He knew what he was doing. I talked to him about the trouble I was having with my robot book. He said that my strongest skill seemed to be in first-person narrative, like Chickenhawk. Maybe I should think about that.

I spent a month writing a hundred pages of a new robot book, version three. This time, the robot told the story. Clever, eh? First-person narrative. I sent this to Knox and then we drove to Maine to spend a month at my mother-in-law’s cabin on the lake. While I was there, Knox sent me back the manuscript saying, “I just don’t get this, Bob.”