God's Marker

         When my sister Laurie came home from the hospital after having an appendectomy, she told me that losing your appendix was God's marker for those that are to go to heaven when they die. She said that there were so many people in the world today that God had a hard time remembering who was supposed to go and who was to go the other way.  I wasn't sure if I should believe that or not. "But Mr. Shoemaker down the street was an old man when he had his appendix out. He was always so nice to us and he even served in World War One.  How does God know after twelve years that you supposed to go to heaven? You haven't even finished ninth grade."  I was trying to make sense of it.
          "Well some of us are just ready for heaven sooner than others", Laurie replied with an air of confidence..
             Every day for the next six months I would wake up and first thing start poking myself in the stomach hoping that it would hurt so I could have my appendix out and God would mark me to go to heaven too.
             I was seven years old at the time and I shared the same bed with my sister.  We had three bedrooms, but my older bother Rick got his own room. He was fifteen at the time and my parents said he needed his privacy.  The room Laurie and I shared was dark and smelled of burlap and dust from the aging carpet in government furnished Army housing. The southern-facing aluminum-framed sliding windows let little sunlight into the room. The dreary brown mottled drapes blocked what little light came through the windows.  The closet had brown hollow sliding doors with round holes where brass finger pulls once were.  We had found the pulls in the garage when we moved in where someone had used them as an ashtray.  The doors had long ago come off their bottom track and so they flapped when opened and closed like starched curtains.  The bed was a double in size that was a hand-me-down from my parents. They had slept on it from the early days of their marriage until we moved into this house on Pershing Street and they bought themselves a new Simmons mattress. It sagged on the side where Dad used to sleep, which Laurie made my side of the bed.  I was now sleeping with my sister, in the bed in which I was conceived.
           While we shared this room, Laurie made it clear that I was just a guest who could only come in when invited. In the morning I had to leave the room until she got dressed and ready to face the world. On school days, Laurie had determined exactly the minimum amount of time that was required for me to get ready for school. She would emerge from the bedroom precisely six minutes before the school bus arrived. I learned to layout my clothes the night before, like a fireman, so that I could be dressed in two minutes. Leaving me time to comb my hair and sprint down the street to the corner to hop on the bus.
         After school I was banned from the room while she did her studying. And then at night, I was invited in only after she was ready for bed and time for lights out.
             Laurie would tell me that in the middle of the night I would climb up on the headboard and crow like a rooster. I didn't believe her, but she was very convincing in telling it. She never told me this to tease me.  Her strategy was not to make me angry. It was an extended propaganda campaign to win over my mind and bring me under her control. She would bring it up in a matter-of-fact way, like at breakfast she would say, "Boy were you crowing loudly last night, I hardly got a wink of sleep until I swatted you one good." She would look at my brother Rick and say, "Did you hear him?" He would just nod and go on eating his bowl of Cheerios. Two weeks later, she would just say to Mother while washing the dishes, "Isn't there anything we can do to make Bobby stop crowing in the middle of the night?" Mother would just smile and say they would talk about that later.
         I knew I wasn't a rooster and I knew there was no way for me to climb up on the flimsy old headboard and crow. And if I did, I surely would know it.  But she was convincing and she had already been picked by God to go to heaven, so I kept wondering and trying to make sense of it all.
             The year was 1962 and the place was Fort Anywhere, USA.  My father was a Captain in the Army and we had lived in so many places, bases and states that one just looked like the other. My father was a veteran of the Korean War. He was career Army and his world was very clear to him. He was a soldier in the Army of the world's most powerful nation; an Army that had vanquished the Nazis and Japanese and preserved freedom around the world.  The stalemate of Korea did not tarnish that image, because the Americans had stood firm against the invading Chinese hordes and stopped the spread of communism in its tracks. My father understood his world, he believed in it and was proud of his work. 
             My father commanded his home just as he commanded his soldiers. This was a time before woman's liberation and "Father Knows Best" was not just the title of a popular TV show of the time. There was no doubt who was in charge of the house when my father was there. While it was firm leadership, it was not authoritarian, arbitrary or cruel. It was a command of respect and competence.
         The Army is a self sustaining organization. It prides itself on being able to carry out its mission regardless who has fallen. There is always somewhere there to pick up the flag and carry on. So it was in our house. When father was not present, there was no doubt who took over command. Without skipping a beat, my mother stepped in and took charge when Dad would leave and relinquished that role when he returned. The world for her was clear as well, or so it appeared to me. She knew her role, and I don't think that she would have ever called it a subservient role. She worked outside the house as a secretary for one of the Colonels of the 82nd Airborne.  She worked in the house under Dad's command, but she had clear delegated authority over selected domestic areas. She was not Dad's servant. In their public moments they were a close partnership; in glimpses of their private moments, there was no pretense of rank, only mutual affection.
             My brother, sister and I had our roles as well. We understood the importance of not disrespecting the name of an Army officer. We made good grades and did our best to stay out of trouble. There was a discipline among us that I was never able to achieve in my children and rarely saw again among others.  It was a discipline achieved not by household tyranny or physical pain. There was the occasional and deserved spanking, but the discipline came more from a tone of voice, a look, and a deep rooted instinctive feeling that there was an authority that was to be respected and not to be challenged. There was a primal fear of would happen should we challenge that authority, much like the fear that would paralyze me as I lay in bed in the dark, certain that there was something lurking in the closet.
             There was never much money and never any lasting friends as we moved from one Army base to another. Despite the torments I received from my brother and sister, they were my best friends; as each of us was to others. We would pass many hours away playing games.  Hide and seek became boring so we invented our own variation which for the lack of a better name we called "that game".
             The rules for That Game were simple. When Mom and Dad had gone out for the evening we would turn out all the lights in the house. Two people would then go hide somewhere in the house. The third person was then to walk through the house trying to find the others without searching or touching anything. The challenge was to find the others by making them laugh by telling jokes or other assorted silly things. For those hiding, it was much more difficult to not laugh when you know that you are not supposed to, so the one doing the searching did not have to be much of a joke teller.  I was never very good at That Game. When I was hiding with Rick, Leslie always knew she could make be laugh by doing the imitation of me being a rooster in the middle of the night. I could hear her flapping her arms as she recounts how I jumped up on the railing. It would only take one Cock-a-doodle-doo before I was snorting in trying to hold back my laughing and Rick would be punching me in the arm.
             In the summer of 1963 Dad got orders to go to a place called Vietnam. We had never heard of such a place and poured over the globe looking for it. We were full of excitement and apprehension about going to a place so far away where the language and people were so different from us. One evening after dinner, Mom and Dad told us that we were going to stay behind while Dad went to Vietnam. They explained that Rick was coming up on his senior year of high school and sure to be star on the football team next year. And Laurie had all her friends. And besides there was a war starting over there and it might be dangerous. Dad corrected her that it was not a war, that the communists were trying to make trouble for the democratically elected government of Vietnam, just like they did in Korea, and it was our job to help them because we did not want the Reds taking over all of Asia. He was going to be an advisor to the South Vietnam Army. He was going to help them help themselves. In the end, he assured us that "President Kennedy will not let this become an American war."  I didn't understand the whole North Vietnam versus South Vietnam thing, and why my Dad had to go help fight Commies, but I was proud of him and so I tried to understand.
             After Dad left, Mother took charge and our life's routine did not change much, except for the addition of the Sunday morning letter writing to Dad.  We were required to recount what happened that week so he would not lose touch with us. Mom was committed to not letting him miss any significant moment in our lifes while he was gone.  Return letter from him were not as frequent. When they
did arrive, Mother would read them in private, then call us into the living room for a public reading of those parts that were acceptable for us to hear.
             That fall Rick was the star of the football team as everyone expected, so his letter were all about his exploits of scoring the winning touchdown and the parties afterward. Father was sure to acknowledge each game in his letters back to us. Laurie wrote of her many friends and the relationship drama of the week, either hers or some one she knew. For me, I was still struggling to understand why Dad had been sent to the other side of the earth to fight for something I didn't quite understand. My letters were full of questions that never received a direct answer as we sat around the living room listening to Mother reading the latest letter from Dad. We heard stories of what a beautiful country Vietnam is, how wonderful the people are; there were stories of children who ran up to the Americans with smiles as they searched for a handout. There were words of how he would return soon when his mission was accomplished. I still did not understand.
             In November 1963, President Kennedy was shot dead in the streets of Dallas, Texas. I sat in front of the TV for hours watching Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley try in vain to explain what had happened. I was rapt and glued to the TV when the Zapruder film was shown over and over. I couldn't help but wonder if the streets of Saigon were like the streets of Dallas. The Sunday following the assassination, I wrote Dad and asked him if President Johnson also believed that we should not let Vietnam become an American war.
         For days I watched the constant coverage of the assassination, the funeral, the new President and film biographies of the life of John Kennedy. When they talked of his many illness, including that he had an appendectomy as a young man, it started to make a little sense.
         The day before we were notified that Dad had been killed, Rick announced that he would be enlisting in the Army after his graduation. When the Army officers left our home the next day, Mother was crying softly. Laurie and I sat in stunned silence not knowing what to say or do. Rick put his arm around Mom and told her he was going to walk where Dad had walked and make him and the family proud. Laurie then began to cry and went to the bedroom to be alone. We had moved so many times, that I had got used to getting know people and calling them my best friend and then leaving and never seeing or talking with them again.  I had learned to accept that without pain. I felt pain now and I struggled to understand why this was different.
             The Army would not tell us much about how or why Dad had died. They only said that he had been on a classified mission somewhere in the northern part of South Vietnam and he had been killed by enemy gunfire.
            In a few days we all got in the family car and traveled to Washington DC to bury Dad at Arlington National Cemetery. It had only been six month since President Kennedy had been buried there and we walked by the crowds of people still passing by his grave.
             Mother was somber and composed as we stood at the graveside watching the precision of the military funeral. She looked elegant in her simple black mourning dress and black hat with a lace veil that covered her eyes. I couldn't help but think how Jackie Kennedy had been a role model for my mother's generation of women. Now my mother was the first of many more to come in following her example of pained dignity as we said farewell to our father and husband who had been taken down in service to their country.
             As we walked silently away from the grave, I whispered to Mother, "Mom, did Dad ever have his appendix taken out?"
             She gave me a rather puzzled look and said, "Why yes, he did have it removed before I had met him. Why do you ask?"
             "No reason really", I said. We returned to our silent walk.
As we past by the grave site of President Kennedy, I paused and let the others walk ahead.  I watched the eternal flame flicker in the gentle breeze, burning to forever symbolize the memories and dreams of a President that should live one.  For my father and all the others lying here in Arlington eternally there is no flame but only a cold, white headstone.  Their memories and dreams are left to burn on in the hearts of those that loved them.  I turned and continued my somber walk away from my father. I watched my mother, brother and sister walking ahead, holding hands with their heads bowed.  God's marker had taken our President and my father to heaven. Laurie bore the same marker, when would it be her turn?