USS Blue (DD 744) off Hawaii Hi again, folks. Since it’s Valentine’s Day, this a love in war story, It’s true, except for her real name and a condensing of some events. It’s also a chapter from my own Book of Love, War and Remembrances. (With appropriate acknowledgement to Herman Wouk for the title.)
We need to go back a few years, to the Fall of 1968. The Vietnam War was raging furiously and the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. High school classmates were returning, sometimes walking and sometimes in body bags. The voting and drinking age was 21. A small matchbox of pot could get you hard time at Folsom, a 45 minute drive from where I lived.
There was a Draft on and I was holding a student deferment while attending Sacramento City College behind a busted home, two jobs and a devout attempt to keep the small dance and show combo which had been sustaining me in several ways, alive. My generation was fighting for its life and in my world, those who were not preparing to do duty for God, country and whatever were protesting the war and suffering their own casualties. There didn’t seem to be much middle ground.
Autumn is a lonely time in Sacramento. The harvest is over and the seemingly endless delta, with its network of rivers, levees and vast barren fields stretches to all horizons under grey skies that mark the flights of southbound Canada geese.
In some ways, I was a lot older at 19 than I am at 59. For the last three years, I’d been leading six other teenagers into a career union musicians twice our age envied. We played everything from the USO and high school proms and balls, to military base service clubs and for private parties at such Class A houses as the Sacramento Inn and the Mansion Inn. We had one motto that served us real well. Don’t play for the money, play for the people.
With all that was going on around us, we figured we’d be lucky to see 21. So we broke some rules and assumed a few of the rights of the adults we actually were. We worked hard and we played hard. We were tough, prematurely cynical and had less than no patience with anyone who tried to suggest a different way of living. It was like, if you can’t handle it, fine. Just don’t (expletive deleted) with it.
Kirsten was about the last person I should have met back then. She was slim, lithe, doe-eyed shy, and her thick ash blonde hung in long, loose natural waves, draping her slim shoulders and brushing them, like angel wings. She was from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east, and she reminded me, in a lot of ways, of Heidi. She was down in Sacramento, living with her sister and family and going for an AA degree in art.
I worked for the school newspaper and she helped print it. There was a glass partition between the newsroom and the print shop and I one morning, I looked up from my typewriter to see this Hallmark and Campbell Soup young mother holding a baby in her arms. (It was the print shop teacher’s daughter but I didn’t know that at the time.) I was just blown away by this incredible wave of gentleness that was suddenly washing over me. I felt vulnerable and that’s not always appropriate. I was tough because I needed to be and there was room for sex but there was not room for romance.
So I turned away and made it a point not to look at her working on a layout table about a foot and a pine wainscoted and glass wall away. I "heard" her humming softly to herself and remembered my own time in her mountains. Half of me needed and enjoyed it. The other half of me was telling me to focus on the tasks at hand. I was running on about 12 cups of coffee and a pack of Winstons a day and about the only time I had to myself was lunch.
Sacramento City College is situated across Freeport Boulevard from one of the most understatedly beautiful parks I’ve ever been in. Back then, it includes the Sacramento Zoo and a duck and boating pond. Trees all over. An amphitheater, some baseball diamond and tennis courts. I liked to go over to the duck pond, dine on peanut butter and/or baloney sandwiches, a bag of potato chips, and a half pint of milk. I brought old bread for the ducks and we had some interesting conversations. I always ate alone, except for the ducks.
So when noon came, I shoved Kirsten to the back of my mind and made a beeline to the duck pond. I remember that day as particularly Canada goose lonely, with an east wind blowing off her mountains. I’d just found out two of the guys in the band had been reclassified 1A, which meant "first available". We had weekend gigs through New Years. After that, my job was pretty much over and my outfit and way of life scattered to the winds.
Her shadow flickered across me before I actually saw her. She was dressed in a nice Weinstocks car coat with a mock fur collar and I remembered she’s been in a man’s workshirt and levis under that. She had a khaki knapsack that I later learned her grandfather had worn in Belleau Wood and the Argonne. She glanced at me and the only bench available, which was also the one I was sitting on, in the middle, with my own kit spread out on both sides. She arched a delicately feathered eyebrow and I stared back at her, without moving.
I read loneliness in her eyes and half of me wanted to tell her to just truck on because I had enough on my own plate, including a girlfriend with whom I was also having a real interesting time. The wind off her mountains rose a bit and scattered the bag of bread, the waxed paper open with the sandwiches, and the partially consumed bag of potato chips. By the time I recovered what didn’t land in the duck pond, she was comfortably ensconced on one end of the bench, drinking vegetable soup out of a plaid thermos and feeding the ducks from her own bag of stale bread.
Kirsten and I got to be friends after that. It turned out that we lived just a half mile apart so we were together most of the walk home from school we managed to make every late afternoon. It gave us a chance to talk and to get to know one another.
I learned that the war hadn’t left Kirsten untouched. On her right wrist was a bracelet with the name of her high school sweetheart, by then a Marine Missing In Action in Vietnam. She talked about the plans they’d made for him to come back and get a good job in the woods, while she found work in Placerville, the county seat. There was some land they could save for and he’d build the cabin. And together, they’d raise a son who would be, like their father, a football hero, and their daughter, like her mother, good with animals and art.
Kirsten tried to get me to talk about my life but since there wasn’t a lot of good news to report, she didn’t have a lot of luck with that. Instead, I listened to her and her dreams. They were modest and they were wholesome. And they depended on a Marine missing in action.
When grades came out in December, I found out, not to my total surprise, that I’d flunked most of my classes and was no longer eligible for a student deferment. By then, it was a lot colder and it got darker a lot earlier so Kirsten and I met in the cafeteria before starting home. That night, when everybody else was comparing report cards, she read the look on my face and tears gathered in her eyes.
She held my hand when we walked across the street to the bus stop. She hugged me tightly with her face buried in my chest on the ride home. We got off at her stop and I walked her the half mile in the thick tule fog to her sister’s front door. She held me even tighter and before putting the key in the lock turned and faced me.
"Please don’t do this to me, Please don’t leave."
Neither of us had a lot of choice and I did, by enlisting in the Navy and volunteering for Vietnam. The first time I returned to Sacramento, a some two years later, she was living with a hippie musician and sharing his needle. The second time, seven years or so later, she was running a flower shop in a real mellow part of downtown, near Sutters Fort. She said she wasn’t in love with anyone and hadn’t been in a long time. She was just as lovely then as she was the first time I met her. But when I went to cup her cheek and tell her that gently, she withdrew and shook her head.
"Nor do I ever intend to love again. It hurts too much."
It’s been some thirty years now and several other wars. I wonder how many other Kirstens there are out there. I suspect there’s a few.
On Valentine’s Day, I dream of a time when there won’t be quite so many.
