Blue-Eyed Boy: A Memoir - Couverture rigide

Timberg, Robert

3,77

168 �valuations de Goodreads

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1594205663 ISBN 13 : 9781594205668

Editeur : Penguin Press, 2014

Afficher les exemplaires de cette �dition ISBN

Extrait :

One

SHORT-TIMER

Da Nang TAOR, January 18, 1967

The previous evening, just before turning in, I wandered off by myself, stared into the distance, and murmured, “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t die tonight.”

I knew it was melodramatic, but I did it every night, without fail. In a way it was a message to a God in which I had long since stopped believing. Almost. If there was a God, I had concluded years earlier, He was at best an indifferent God, one just as likely to kill me during the night as He was to let me live through it. Depended on His mood. Did He have a good day or a bad day? Maybe it was an unprayer, a way of not praying to the God I didn’t believe in, so He wouldn’t notice me and decide to squash me for the hell of it.

I rolled off my cot that morning, pulled on my boots, and stumbled over to the contraption we used for shaving: a fence post driven into the ground, with a metal mirror nailed to it above a wooden ledge to hold a helmet filled with water. Marines, officers and enlisted, shaved in the morning when they could. Personal appearance counted, even in the field. It was a matter of discipline, and in a combat zone few things are more important.

“Almost ready, Lieutenant?” the Mighty Mite driver asked.

“Be there in a minute,” I replied, ducking back into my tent. I pulled on my utility blouse. (We slept in our trousers. The company Command Post was mortared regularly. No one fancied running for the bunkers in their skivvies.) Then I slipped on my flak jacket, grabbed my web belt, on which hung a .45 caliber pistol and my sheathed Ka-Bar, and snapped it around my waist.

“Thought you were going on R&R today, Sir,” said the Mighty Mite driver as we pulled out of the CP and onto the dirt road that led to Battalion Headquarters.

“Change of plans, Lance Corporal,” I replied.

“You’re one of the short guys, aren’t you, Lieutenant?” asked the driver.

“Can’t get much shorter, Lance Corporal.”

A brief ride to Battalion HQ. The vehicles that would form our small convoy were waiting, their engines running. I passed the bulky canvas bag I had just been given to a Marine already on top of one of the two Amtracs and climbed up to join him. Moments later the convoy began to rumble down the hill and onto the road where my future awaited me.

————

Ihad not expected to be sitting on top of an Amtrac that morning. For the past couple of months, and until about 2100 the previous evening, I planned to be in Okinawa, looking for a string of pearls for my wife and scouting out stereo equipment for our small apartment atop a two-car garage in the breezy California community of Laguna Beach. That’s what young Marine officers did as their Rotation Tour Date neared; take a few days of R&R in Tokyo or on Okinawa and load up on cut-rate, high-quality jewelry and electronic gear for the trip home. Tax-free and duty-free, too. My RTD, 1 February, was getting close. In thirteen days I would have been overseas for thirteen months, a standard tour for Marines and one month longer than the Army kept its troops in-country. The extra month never made sense to me, by the way, except as an exercise in one-upmanship on the part of the Corps, always paranoid, though not without reason, that it would be disbanded and its men and women scattered among the other services.

But there would be no shopping spree for me today, though at the moment I had almost enough money with me to buy out Mikimoto Pearls. Sadly, the money was legal tender only in South Vietnam. The dollar-bill-size notes, known as military payment certificates, came in various denominations and each carried, in the place of honor normally accorded to George Washington, Old Hickory, or Honest Abe, a woman who reminded me of Jackie Kennedy.

None of the money, which was stashed in the brown canvas bag I had clamped between my knees, was mine. It belonged to the five officers and eighty enlisted men of Bravo Company, First Antitank Battalion, First Marine Division (Rein), FMF, and thanks to me, and to the Leatherneck tradition that said Marines get paid every two weeks as long as they were not under hostile fire, they were about to enjoy another on-time payday. It didn’t matter that you could only spend MPCs at a PX or some other service facility like an enlisted men’s club, or that Bravo Company, especially its Second Platoon—a unit deep in the boonies and whose CP was the first stop on my paymaster rounds—was not likely to even smell a place like that anytime soon.

Bravo’s five officers were the company commander, the executive officer—that was me—and three platoon leaders. All of us except the skipper took turns serving as pay officer. The honor was mine today even though it wasn’t my turn. I had been dragooned into it because the platoon leader whose turn it was found himself otherwise occupied. This was, of course, a war. So the duty fell to me, and instead of R&R and methodically working my way through the PX at Futenma, trying to decide between a TEAC or a Sony tuner, then relaxing at the O Club with the popular gin-and-champagne concoction known as a French 75, I was scanning the sun-bleached terrain from atop an Amtrac as it bounced westward along a rutted, dusty trail toward the base camp of Bravo Company’s presumably cash-strapped Second Platoon.

A word about the vehicle on which I was riding, since it was anything but an innocent bystander in this tale. The LVTP-5A1 Amphibian Tractor, the Amtrac’s official designation, was designed to transport Marines from ship to shore as they assaulted enemy beaches, a primary mission of the Corps in World War II and, to a much lesser extent, during the Korean War (think Inchon, MacArthur’s masterstroke). Since there were no opposed landings in Vietnam up to that time (or later for that matter), Amtracs were deprived of their primary mission. Instead, the Marine Corps used them as substitutes for armored personnel carriers. The Corps had no APCs of its own.

The Army’s APCs resembled Amtracs; both were rectangular in shape and ran on tracks, like tanks. But there was one design feature that separated the Amtrac from the APC, and it would make all the difference in the world to me. Twelve fuel cells containing a total of 456 gallons of gasoline, with an octane rating of 80, lay between the hull and the deck plates of the Amtrac. This was not much of a problem when the vehicle was employed as intended, for churning through water on the way to a beach or crunching over a barrier reef; on land, though, should an Amtrac encounter a mine, it became a death trap, anyone inside instantly fricasseed. By this point in America’s great Southeast Asian adventure, no one rode inside an Amtrac; you sat on top or clung to the side. The fuel cells were where they always had been, though, and an Amtrac was still an Amtrac, and not an APC.

————

With thirteen days to go, I had long since qualified as a full-fledged short-timer. I had my handmade short-timer’s calendar: a drawing of my wife sitting on the edge of a bed, in a T-shirt hiked up to midthigh. At first I was going to draw her naked, then I decided there was too great a chance that one of my fellow Marines might stumble upon it. But I played with the drawing enough that with a little imagination it began to look like the cover of one of the pulp novels I obsessed over as a kid. Then I superimposed one hundred squares on the drawing. I had been filling in a box a day since October 10, one hundred days from my RTD. The one-hundredth box was where you’d expect it to be. There was nothing subtle about anyone’s short-timer’s calendar, certainly not mine.

There were more serious concerns as my days in-country grew short. Notably, what next? I was a Naval Academy graduate and a Marine first lieutenant about to be promoted to captain. In less than a year and a half, I could resign my commission and begin a civilian career. Did I want to stay in the Corps or see what else might be out there for me?

I already had my orders home. I was going to the Fifth Marine Division, a newly mobilized unit based at Camp Pendleton, on the California coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. That meant my wife and I could remain in Laguna Beach, where we had lived before my battalion mounted out and which we loved. But scuttlebutt already had drifted across the Pacific that the new 5th MarDiv would be deployed to Vietnam within six months, no doubt bringing me back with it.

Then there was the war. Since I was in it, I didn’t feel I could trust my judgment about whether it was a good war or a bad one. It didn’t matter, not then. All I knew was that I was ready to go home, the sooner the better. In truth, I had not had a horrible war.

The First Antitank Battalion was a curious unit, with an even more curious weapon, a lightly armored, tracked vehicle called the Ontos (officially the Rifle, Multiple 106 mm, Self-propelled, M50A1). Its main armament consisted of six 106 mm recoilless rifles. Ontos means “thing” in Greek. It looked like a roach squirting here and there with six gleaming cannons protruding from its carapace. It was originally built for the Army, but the Army decided it didn’t want it, so the Marines took it. Or so the story goes.

I was, as it happened, an infantry officer. To my mind, that designation made me a fish out of water in an antitank unit. But that, which I asked for and received upon graduating from Marine officers Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, did not guarantee me assignment to an infantry battalion, as I thought it would. I arrived at First Marine Division Headquarters at Camp Pendleton in December 1965 only to learn that I had been assigned to the First Antitank Battalion.

I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t set records at the Basic School, but I wasn’t a fuckup, either; what the hell happened? I hurried to the headquarters of First Antitanks and reported to the battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel.

“Sir,” I told him, “there’s been a big mistake. I don’t belong in this battalion.”

“And why is that, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“I’m an infantry officer, Colonel, not an Ontos guy. I’m supposed to be a rifle platoon leader.”

The colonel proceeded to explain to me, in a reasonably kind tone, that Ontos platoon leader, the position he had in mind for me, was an infantry officer’s billet, though he himself was a tank officer.

I begged, pleaded, importuned, beseeched, entreated. “Sir,” I cried, “please transfer me to an infantry battalion.”

“Lieutenant,” the colonel said, “the Marine Corps in its wisdom assigned you to this battalion for a reason. Not that I know what the hell it is. But you’re here and you’re gonna stay here.”

By then his voice had taken on an edge.

“Sir,” I said, “I’m from New York. I don’t know squat about vehicles. I didn’t learn to drive until I was twenty-three. I don’t know how to change the oil in my car. I don’t even know how to check the oil.”

“Lieutenant,” said the colonel, “the First Sergeant is sitting at a desk outside my office. I want you to go to him right now and get checked in. Welcome aboard.”

————

Idon’t know if we Americans were doing anything worthwhile in Vietnam. Seems like when I first got there I saw this old peasant ankle deep in a rice paddy, walking behind a plow pulled by a water buffalo. And I kept seeing him every couple of months, never in the same place, him and his water buffalo just plowing a rice paddy—a pair from central casting. He always had his back to me, so I never saw his face. In between sightings, though, my battalion engaged in search-and-destroy operations, convoy duty, resupply missions. And we’d get intelligence briefings that said the Vietcong were on the run, or lying in wait for us behind the next ridgeline.

Then I’d see the old guy again, him and his water buffalo, never giving any indication that a bunch of Marines armed to the teeth were half a football field away, or that anything we had done since I last saw him had had any impact on his life. I would have felt better if once, just once, he had taken off his wide-brimmed peasant hat and waved to us—or spit at us or given us the finger—but he never did. It was as if we weren’t even there.

But Vietnam would not be my problem much longer. When my plane took off for the States in thirteen days, the war would be behind me. More important, all the demons that had tormented me since childhood would be left to fend for themselves. My parents were good people, and talented ones. My mother was a magazine cover girl before she even reached her teens, then a featured dancer in Broadway musicals mounted by the legendary showman Florenz Ziegfeld. My father was a composer who wrote much of the background music for Fleischer Studios cartoons such as Popeye, Betty Boop, and Superman. His older brother, Herman, a comic, was the family headliner. He also wrote the Marx Brothers’ first vaudeville act. His sister, Hattie, managed their act. Dad led the band when Herman performed and was often pressed into service as Herman’s straight man. When Herman and the Marx Brothers worked together, Dad often roomed with the brothers on the road and they delighted in playing tricks on him.

Both my parents were in vaudeville, which is where they met. She was Irish Catholic; he was Jewish. That should have been a problem back then. It wasn’t, not for them—that is, if you don’t count my deeply religious maternal grandmother routinely feigning suicide by putting her head in the oven when she heard her daughter, the oldest of her seven kids, coming home from work or a date with my father.

But there were other issues, which led to divorce, and for my two younger sisters and me, a seemingly endless diaspora. We lived with people all over the city of New York, sometimes together, sometimes apart. By the time I reached high school I had attended a dozen schools, three in the same year twice.

By high school all three of us kids were living with my mother. By then, though, she was an alcoholic and life was often hellacious. My father was a timid man whose fears undermined his enormous talent and may have contributed to my mother’s alcoholism. I inherited his fearfulness; at least I believed I did.

I fought against it by constantly testing myself, doing things I never could imagine him doing. I boxed in the Police Athletic League, played football in high school and on the sandlots for a few years after that. I was a better baseball player, but I never even went out for my high school team. I didn’t want to be distracted from football by what I thought of as a pussy sport, at least when compared to the action on the gridiron. After high school, I went to the Naval Academy instead of a normal college, selected the Marine Corps over the Navy because it was tougher, then became an infantry officer because I couldn’t imagine anything tougher than that.

I was proud to be a Marine. Unlike many of my fellow Leathernecks, though, I wasn’t thrilled that a war had materialized to allow me to put my training to use. But as my tour in Vietnam drew to a close, I felt I had done my time in Hell and, to my mind, I was finished testing myself. I was ready for a life devoid of madness. Time to drop my pack and just be happy.

I was going home to a lot....

Revue de presse :

The Washington Post:
“In a crisp, unsentimental style, Timberg ... traces his long postwar journey from the hospital ward to the newsroom—or, as he puts it, ‘Remember[ing] how I decided not to die....’ Wisdom resonates throughout Blue-Eyed Boy, a fierce and enthralling memoir....‘I suspect there’s something essentially human about what I fought my way through,’ he writes in the book’s prologue. That only begins to hint at the fullness of his life’s journey. This is vital reading.”

U.S. News & World Report:
“In a clear confiding voice, [Timberg’s] autobiography Blue-Eyed Boy speaks to you like an American Proust, straight from the start: 'Falling asleep is never a problem for me. Waking up always is.' As he approached age 70, he at last let himself look back at the jagged scenery of his life....There’s a hardwon beauty in those crevices.... Timberg’s memoir is a searing loss of innocence tale, one that may address a wider swath of college baby boomers in the 1960s than he thought. Whatever side you were on when it came to the Vietnam War, it ended badly. Nobody won. America suffered a shattering loss of innocence over that war, starting in 1967, the year Timberg—who goes by 'Bob'—lost the man in the mirror. Then comes the best part of his journey: a mordant tale told of adult resurrection.”

The American Conservative:
“Blue-Eyed Boy, the just-released memoir by wounded veteran and journalist Robert Timberg, excels with limpid writing and gripping personal travail and triumph, never once hinting at or lamenting what-might-have-been, even as it admirably meets all the requisites of an exemplary memoir....Forcing the reader to seriously ponder obligations and responsibilities to one’s country and society, Blue-Eyed Boy is a welcome tonic, an elixir of life delivered with hard-hitting flesh-and-blood reality. Refreshingly honest in depicting less than admirable personal behavior, Timberg is equally blunt in recounting the arduously difficult and tortuously slow road to mental, psychological, and physical recovery. In spite of numerous setbacks and indignities in the struggle to cope and 'come back,' Timberg thrives as much in his writing as he has in life.”

Bookpage:
“A fascinating look at how tragedy that would make most men crumble instead drove the author to survive, and on many levels to succeed....[A] fast moving, crisply written memoir.”

Kirkus Reviews:
“An empathetic and extremely candid memoir from a man who decided 'to remember how I decided not to die...not let my future die.'"

Booklist:
“This thoroughly absorbing autobiography really begins with the author’s life-altering experience of being badly wounded (and severely and permanently disfigured) as a marine officer in Vietnam..... Timberg will strike many readers as demonstrating the truth of the notion that 'genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains'—although, in Timberg’s case, he first had to demonstrate a large capacity for enduring pain.”

Curled Up with a Good Book:
“This is an extraordinary tale of a remarkable boy with more courage and determination than any ten normal men. It will make you cry and make your own petty problems disappear completely.”

Jim Lehrer:
“If you only have time to read one memoir right now, make it Blue-Eyed Boy. Bob Timberg lived through what an exploding land mine did to him as a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam. It changed forever most everything about him, including the way he looked. The story he tells superbly and honestly is one of pain and suffering, resilience and recovery that I promise will also stay forever with and within you. I hereby salute this stunning piece of work and invite you to do the same.”

Mark Shields, syndicated columnist, PBS NewsHour:
“If, as the proverb teaches, an honest man fears neither the light nor the dark, Bob Timberg, the author of this unsparingly honest memoir, must be fearless. This is his compelling story of suffering and redemption, of passion and courage, the story of one flawed and fallible, but ultimately admirable man who sustained grievous wounds in combat but managed to rebuild his life and make it matter. This is a gripping and honest book written by an honored journalist who is an honest man. Blue-Eyed Boy, I can almost guarantee, will make you cry, make you laugh, and make you think.”

Mark Bowden, New York Times bestselling author of Black Hawk Down:
“To say that war scars a man for life is a clich�, but for Bob Timberg it is a clich� that came excruciatingly true. In one searing moment on a well-traveled trail in Vietnam, a land mine exploded beneath his vehicle and left him hideously scarred. Timberg has lived with that long ago war every day since. His fight to rebuild his face, and to carve out a normal life and admirable career is as real and courageous a war story as you will ever read.”

Nathaniel Fick, New York Times bestselling author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer:
"Bob Timberg's Blue-Eyed Boy is a homecoming story in the tradition of The Odyssey. The road back after combat is long, and Timberg brings his fortunate readers on a deeply personal journey that is also the journey of a generation. It's a special book by a special man, and I am glad to have read it."

John S. Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun:
“Blue-Eyed Boy is Robert Timberg’s candid and compelling memoir of courage on the battlefield and sustained heroism over the decades to follow. Terribly wounded as a young Marine officer in Vietnam, he reclaims his life in faltering steps. Eventually finding a calling as an author, he illuminates the deep rift in American public life between those who served and those who did not.”