Lizzie's War Read online

  Lizzie’s War

  A Novel

  Tim Farrington

  For my father, Major F. X. Farrington, USMC (ret.),

  with love and gratitude

  Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called…. Brethren, let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.

  1 CORINTHIANS 7

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Three

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Four

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Five

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Six

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Seven

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part Eight

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Nine

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Plus: Insights, Interviews, And More

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by Tim Farrington

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  [ PART ONE ]

  Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

  REINHOLD NIEBUHR

  CHAPTER 1

  JULY 1967

  DETROIT WAS BURNING. The midsummer sun that had made the Ohio turnpikes the usual ordeal seemed suddenly uncertain, caught in the sludge of a smoky sky like a pale orange dime stamped into hot blacktop. In the chastened light, her hometown was ominously unfamiliar. Even the freeway signs seemed ambiguous, inexact translations from the language of her childhood. Elizabeth O’Reilly was disoriented—she refused to use the word lost—and she was running out of gas.

  There were almost no other vehicles on the road, not even cabs and buses. That was the most unnerving thing of all. She always made these visits to her parents braced for traffic, the proud clogged streets of the Motor City, the mass of good American steel in motion. She recalled glimpsing a newspaper headline the day before, something about riots, but she hadn’t taken the news seriously. Detroit was ever volatile, and the newspapers loved to blow a few broken windows up into chaos in the streets. She’d been too busy seeing her husband off to Vietnam to fret about such things.

  In the seat beside her, Liz’s eight-year-old daughter, Katherine, fiddled with the radio, looking for the Beatles. Since the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in June, Kathie and her friends had been in an ecstasy of grief, sobbing through a series of candlelit pajama parties over the death of Paul, which was obvious from the rose he was holding on the album cover. Liz found all the preadolescent intensity a little much. But Kathie was susceptible to extremes of poignancy. At Dulles Airport the previous Wednesday, she’d clung to her father and wailed. She was sure that he was going away to die, like Paul. Mike, stiff in his dress greens and self-conscious in public, his beautiful black hair buzzed close to his skull by some fanatic Marine barber, patted her with a pained air and told her it was no big deal, it was just his job and he’d be home soon. He was uncomfortable with emotional extravagance—with any emotion at all, really, Liz thought ruefully. She knew her husband just wanted to get off to his war without a lot of fuss, and she’d tried to rein Kathie in a bit. But her heart wasn’t in it; she’d even felt a surreptitious gratitude for the frankness of her daughter’s horror. Kathie was wailing for all of them. She was just prepared to be louder about it.

  Liz heard something that sounded like gunfire close by. Or maybe a backfire. Surely a backfire, she told herself. She could see no flames, but the smoke was denser now, sifting in sinister threads across the freeway. As Kathie continued to wade through the radio’s stations, Liz caught a snatch of feverish news coverage—“…in a twelve-block area east of Twelfth Street…”—but her daughter skipped past it blithely. Liz almost told her to go back, then decided not to press the issue. There was no sense getting everyone all worked up.

  In the back of the Fairlane station wagon, her other three children occupied themselves with the quiet ease of seasoned travelers. Between the moves imposed by the Marine Corps every couple years and frequent trips to their scattered relatives, they’d spent a lot of their childhoods in cars. Deborah, the youngest at five years old, was reading An Otter’s Tale for perhaps the fiftieth time, oblivious to the mayhem nearby, her china blue eyes and perfect round face composed. She had already finished the book once this trip, somewhere on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and had turned back to the first page and started over immediately. As Liz watched her now in the rearview mirror, a siren began to scream in the burning inner city to their right. Her younger daughter turned a page. She had an air of serenity, like a child in a dream.

  Beside Deb-Deb, Angus, seven, pressed his face against the window on the freeway side of the car. He had been counting license plates since Maryland and was up to thirty-seven states. The paucity of traffic was the only effect of Detroit’s upheaval that he seemed to have noticed so far. Behind him, in the station wagon’s rear well, Danny, the oldest at ten years old, had put his biography of Stonewall Jackson aside and turned toward the smoke, his brow wrinkled just like his father’s would have been, more in alertness than in fear. He met Liz’s gaze briefly in the rearview mirror, his glance both sober and excited, and she felt the weird camaraderie she had felt with him almost from the moment he was born, the sense of someone home behind those blue-gray eyes. It was oddly comforting. And, sometimes, scary.

  The children didn’t know it yet, but there was a fifth passenger. Liz was six weeks pregnant. It had been a catastrophe of sorts, a classic Catholic mistake. The last thing she wanted. But there it was. She could feel the new life inside her as a hotter place, a burning spot, as if she had swallowed a live coal. And as a weight, tilting some inner scale toward helpless rage. It wasn’t something she wanted to feel. She had more than enough guilt and ambivalence with the children already born.

  The maddening static gave way abruptly to music. Kathie had finally found a station to her satisfaction.

  What would you do if I sang out of tune?

  Would you stand up and walk out on me?

  “I see a tank!” Angus exclaimed.

  “There aren’t any tanks in Detroit,” Liz said firmly, wondering if it was true.

  “That’s an APC,” Danny offered from the back of the car.

  “Wow!” Angus twisted in his seat to get a better look. “Hey, look at all that smoke!”

  “God help us,” Liz muttered. “What in the world is an APC?”

  “An armored personnel carrier,” Angus told her, a little condescendingly. Both her boys were fluent in military jargon, Marine Corps brats through and through. She would have preferred them to be up to speed on Wordsworth.

  “Something’s burning!” Deb-Deb piped up.

  Kathie looked up, prepared to be dramatically alarmed. “What?!”

  The gas gauge needle was farther bel
ow the E than Liz had ever seen it, lower even than it had been the time she ran out of gas on the D.C. Beltway at rush hour with all four kids less than six years old and crying for dinner. The Woodward exit was coming up; the exit after that was the Chrysler Freeway. If she didn’t get off soon she was going to end up running out of gas on the bridge to Canada or something.

  I get by with a little help from my friends,

  Ooo, I get high with a little help from my friends…

  “Do APCs have license plates?” Angus asked.

  The Ford’s engine hiccuped, unnervingly, and Liz hit the turn signal and lurched toward the exit ramp, trying to remember how to get to Nine Mile Road from downtown. If she could just pick up Gratiot somehow, she was home free. But nothing looked the same when it was burning.

  IT WAS A HELL of a way to find out a friend had died. The forklift brought the seabag into the warehouse and dropped it without ceremony onto a wooden receiving pallet. The driver, a teenage corporal with an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth like a fuse, hopped down and handed Captain Michael O’Reilly, USMC, a casualty ticket and the seabag’s tag. O’Reilly initialed the manifest, and the kid took the clipboard back, tossed off a perfunctory salute, and clambered onto the forklift. He threw the vehicle into reverse, pulled a nifty 180, and powered out of the warehouse gloom into bright Okinawan sunlight, the cigarette, still unlit, cocked at a jaunty angle now.

  Mike shook his head wryly; it was nice to see a man who loved his work. He held his breath while the diesel fumes dispersed, then turned to the casualty ticket and learned that Larry Petroski was dead.

  It was just too weird, like a joke gone wrong. There had to be a punch line. Toward the rear of the building, looming in twilight the color of wet cement, rack after rack of temporary shelving stood loaded with seabags that looked exactly like this one. Mike had received seven bags since lunchtime, certifying each and releasing it to the forklift corporal’s deft manipulation. The kid could place a seabag on the highest shelf without even fully stopping the forklift, with a touch as light as an Oscar Robertson layup. The bag would slide off the tongs into its slot, the rickety shelves would rock and settle, and by the time they had stopped creaking the kid would be out the door again, on his way for the next load, the forklift spewing fumes as the engine revved. He could actually get as many as three bags on the narrow rack, and he could shelve the things two at a time in a pinch. He was a fucking genius with that forklift. Given the volume of seabags coming in, Mike had been grateful for the kid’s heedless efficiency until now. But this bag was Larry Petroski’s.

  In the silence of the deserted warehouse, a big Okinawan rat skittered along the wall behind the nearest shelves. Mike let his breath out and read the casualty ticket again. Petroski, L. C. 1lt. 914179 B-1-3. Larry had been due to make captain soon. He was one promotion cycle behind the rest of their Basic School class because he’d gotten the school commander’s daughter pregnant. Larry married Maria Dumar without excessive delay, which accounted for the fact that his career was not scuttled entirely, but the CO, Colonel Rutgers E. “Red-Ass” Dumar, had never forgiven him. To read Larry’s fitness reports from that period, you would have thought the guy was smuggling drugs and defacing Bibles. In fact, Larry had been one of the best in that officer class, an effortlessly gifted man, blond, brilliant, and graceful under fire, with a rowdy sense of humor a bit too broad for his own good. He’d dutifully named his first son Rutgers, after his father-in-law, but Larry always called the boy Chevy, for the 1953 sedan in which the kid had been conceived.

  Mike heaved the seabag onto the field desk beside the pallet. He was supposed to sort through its contents and make sure there was nothing compromising in it, nothing that would embarrass the slain Marine’s family or reflect badly on the Corps. An exercise in postmortem discretion. It was a tedious, emotionally grueling task under any circumstances, a classic shitty little job for the SLJO, or shitty little job officer, which was what Mike was briefly here at Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa, while he waited for his papers to be processed. He’d been on the Rock a week, sorting through the seabags of dead Marines and stacking casualty tickets like a funeral home clerk. If nothing else, the macabre duty and the boredom of nights in Camp Hansen’s transient BOQ had made him eager to just get on a plane to Da Nang and take whatever came, to start doing what they really paid him for. What Larry had been doing: shooting at bad guys, and getting shot at in return. Putting his ass on the line for God, country, and the commandant of the Marine Corps.

  The combination to the seabag’s lock was on the second tag, the one Larry had filled out before he caught his own flight to Da Nang six months before. Mike recognized his friend’s anniversary with a pang: 9-8-56. Larry had married Maria, who was already showing by then, under the crossed swords of his Basic School classmates at Quantico’s Church of St. Francis of Assisi, two days after graduation, on the Feast of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His unhappy new father-in-law, suspecting the infamous Petroski irony, had only hated him more for that extra religious flourish. But Larry never really gave a damn.

  Mike spun the dial, and the lock fell open. The seabag’s contents were the usual mix of civilian clothes, service “A” uniforms, and books unsuitable to a war zone. Larry had apparently meant to get around to reading Dostoyevsky. There was the edition of Kipling’s poems, with “If” and “Gunga Din” dog-eared, that Larry had had since Basic School, a how-to book on enclosing a porch, and another on plumbing. There was a spare set of dog tags with rubber silencers and a pair of the ugly black military-issue eyeglasses that no one was willing to wear. And there was the personal stuff, the stuff that broke your heart: a gold necklace in a blue velvet box, probably purchased in Hawaii as a coming-home present for Maria, and Larry’s wedding ring, in a plastic bag. No one wore his wedding band in the field; there were too many ways for it to catch on something like a howitzer carriage or a helicopter door and tear your finger off. The wives hated it, they wanted to think of their men wearing the rings every moment they were in danger, but that was just the way things were.

  There was a good picture of Maria and the three kids, all boys named for honored ancestors but invariably called by nicknames based on their places of conception—Chevy, Lejeune, and Ramada—all of them with the same cocky Petroski grin. There were some Japanese fans, probably also presents, a small jade Buddha, two boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts that had melted into single lumps, a pair of lacy white, lavender-scented women’s underwear, a very old rosary, and a pink rabbit’s foot, much the worse for the wear.

  There was no question that the underwear was Maria’s, and Mike left it among the effects when he closed the seabag up. He took the rabbit’s foot out. No sense burdening Larry’s wife with superfluous irony.

  In the rear of the warehouse, the skewed racks imposed their temporary order on the twilight. They seemed both makeshift and weirdly timeless, like the scaffolding he and Liz had seen once through a dawn fog at the archeological digs at Pompeii. A jury-rigged frame for the lumpen dead.

  Mike moved to drop the ragged rabbit’s foot into the trash can, caught himself, wavered, and finally put it in his pocket, feeling foolish. It was sentiment, pure and simple, a way of trying to hang on to Larry somehow. The damn thing had already proven itself useless.

  AT THE OFFICERS’ CLUB, a group of second lieutenants, boot brown bars in crisp traveling uniforms, fresh out of Quantico, had gotten an early jump on happy hour and were singing boisterously from the middle of the bar.

  Born in the backwoods, raised by bears,

  Double-boned jaw, three coats of hair—

  “Schlitz,” Mike told the bartender, a weathered sergeant who was making no attempt to hide his disdain for the junior officers.

  “Got no Schlitz,” the bartender shrugged, and, after a pause long enough to register contempt but deftly short of outright insubordination, “sir.”

  Cast iron balls and a blue-steel rod,

  I’m a mean mother
fucker, a Marine, by God!

  The off-key chorus dissolved into macho banter. The new lieutenants couldn’t wait to get to Vietnam and kick some Charlie ass. Mike glanced at the bartender’s name tag, then leaned forward and spoke under the din in an even, quiet tone. “Sergeant Browning, they’ve had Schlitz on this godforsaken Rock since I ran Third Platoon, Charlie Company, here in 1959, and if you can’t get me my goddamned beer, you’d better not still be behind that bar when I come back there to get it myself. I just sent my best friend’s seabag home to his wife, and I’m feeling a little testy.”

  The bartender met his eyes, then let his gaze drift to O’Reilly’s chest, noting the Chosin campaign ribbon, Bronze Star bar, and Purple Heart.

  “I might have a Schlitz or two stashed away for a special occasion,” he conceded, and turned to the cooler. He dug deep and produced two cream and brown cans, which he pierced brusquely with a C-rat tool. He handed one can to Mike and kept the other for himself.

  “Thank you, Sergeant.”