The Body Shipped Back from Nam Wasn’t Dead Enough

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8. (KJV, Pete Seeger, The Byrds)

The boys who first accused him were labeled “troubled” by our church, from “broken” families. Foothill Christian Center defended him, paid his legal fees. My father visited him in jail, although my mother swears this never happened. I know differently—I was jealous because he wouldn’t take me too.

In 1989, as part of the University of Houston Honors Program’s delegation to the Model Arab League in Washington, DC, I snuck away to the Wall—no, not snuck—was pulled down into those reflective black granite slabs of names. Like quicksand, like a black hole.

I’d always wondered why my father did not serve in Vietnam, but his concept of manhood required no discussion of the personal, especially with his first-born son. Instead: how to mow and edge a lawn, paint a room, fix a toilet, change the oil in my Datsun King Cab pickup. Did he get married and have me to escape the draft? When my daughter, Blake, was in high school, her AP US History teacher assigned her class family research on the Vietnam War—interview a relative who lived through that era.

It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.

Tim O’Brien. “How to Tell a True War Story”

Royal Rangers represented the Assemblies of God response to the Boy Scouts of America, which we viewed as too secular, too liberal. Our church when I was younger, Emmanuel, had a tiny, older congregation. My brother, sister, and I comprised the bulk of the Sunday School. My father knew I envied the other boys at Pasadena Christian who wore their Cub Scout uniforms adorned with badges and patches to school each Wednesday, and persuaded his fellow members on the church board to start an outpost for me and my younger brother.

My paternal grandfather enlisted in the Marine Corps during WWII. A photograph of him in uniform and my grandmother dominated their nightstand. I savored his Camp Pendleton boot camp stories: crawling under barbed wire during live-fire training, killing rattlesnakes in the California desert with just his knife. Years after he died, I inherited a box of documents, including his discharge for unspecified medical reasons, before he was ever sent abroad.

A time of war, and a time of peace.

Larry first appeared in 1978—I had just turned ten. Our outpost was attending a regional campout in the Inland Empire. Clarification: our contingent consisted of me, the only boy, and two men, Richard and Dan, the Pioneer Commander and the Senior Commander. I pitched our tent and built a fire. From the adjoining campsite, a man wearing an infectious smile and an olive-green Army coat with Lathrop sewn above the pocket crossed the tiny creek separating our two sites. “Hi, I’m Larry, Senior Commander at Foothill Christian Center in Glendora. Come join us for some pork-n-beans.”

There is nothing heroic about the Vietnam Memorial—no one would confuse it with the Arc de Triomphe. That was part of the initial controversy; critics referred to it as “a black gash of shame and sorrow” and “a nihilistic slab of stone.” It didn’t help that the architect was a young, female, Chinese American student at Yale, Maya Lin. Heroic, no, but unbearably cathartic.

There is nothing heroic about the Vietnam Memorial—no one would confuse it with the Arc de Triomphe. That was part of the initial controversy; critics referred to it as “a black gash of shame and sorrow” and “a nihilistic slab of stone.” It didn’t help that the architect was a young, female, Chinese American student at Yale, Maya Lin. Heroic, no, but unbearably cathartic.

A time to be born, and a time to die.

I entered this world in 1968, mid-war. Proudly displayed in the front office of my parents’ business, Joy Publications, was a black-and-white photograph of my father and his sister Esther in their Civil Air Patrol cadet uniforms, with Eisenhower standing oblivious in the foreground. My grandfather served as Chaplain for California. Before Blake called my father about the Vietnam era, I asked her to subtly inquire why he did not fight, especially given my grandfather’s belief in the morality of the US military. The answer: my father was ambivalent, but my grandmother did not want her first born to die—she persuaded my grandfather to use his connections and influence with the International Bible College in San Antonio.

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt I was sexually molested. But more than “felt”—closer to “known”—but I’m aphantasic, I can’t create images in my mind, so my memories are never sensory, never vivid. My rational, science-oriented mind tends to doubt what it cannot see and prove. The critical question was also “who?” The only man I had even been alone with was my father, but he never had any physical contact with me—not even a hug or a pat on the shoulder my entire childhood. My father stunned me, at twenty-seven, when I brought Claire, my fiancé, out to meet him and my mother—on the tarmac at Ontario Airport, he walked up and embraced me for the first time. Larry, I knew, was a convicted sexual predator, but I dismissed him as a candidate because I had never been alone with him. When I was thirty-five and severely depressed, my mother asked me out of nowhere, “Did Larry ever do anything to you?” Without pausing I responded “yes,” and added, “but I was never alone with him.” She told me I always went up early with him to campouts and stayed late, over a period of three years.

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

Evangelical Christians feared two things in the 1970s and 80s: rock music and Dungeons & Dragons, both signs of the Antichrist’s influence in the world. The sexual abuse of children by men of the church was a distinctly Catholic thing.

I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.

Yusef Komunyakaa. “Facing It”

Confronting the mirrored blackness, Lathrop was the name I sought. For reasons I can’t recall, I looked under 1971—the year he returned—and then every other year. Thousands of names, but none were his. I knew he wasn’t dead, so why did I try to locate him on the Wall? The sexual abuse had been buried deep—I longed to die every day, but couldn’t say why.

My parents moved churches, from Emmanuel to Foothill Christian, in the summer before I entered sixth grade. They said they did it for us, my siblings and me, because there were no children at Emmanuel. At Foothill, we could have friends our own age, I could be in a Sunday School class with someone other than my sister.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh.

I frequently ask why I let it happen, why I didn’t say anything? What always pops in my mind first is that the sexual abuse only ranks second among my childhood traumas. The psychological religious trauma began poisoning my psyche and outlook years earlier—my mother noticed a dramatic change by the time I was seven, although I’ve never explained the cause to her. Could Larry detect that? Was I a “troubled” youth?

Shortly after the memories started returning, I googled “Larry Lathrop.” Not a common name and it was January 2004, while the Internet still felt more like a neighborhood than a multiverse. One hit: a Vietnam veterans’ List Serve. One post: a cryptic reference to “something” that happened “over there” and his struggle to deal with it. Didn’t indicate whether he was the victim, the perpetrator, or the witness.

A few years later, my mother called to tell me that he had died—a massive heart attack. No suffering. I was livid, frustrated—death represents the final release from this world, not into some eternal realm of bliss or punishment, but into non-existence. I’ve longed for that nothingness—from the first time I pressed a pillow over my face when I was nine, mimicking what I had seen on TV—the one escape from the depression my mother noticed but didn’t investigate. His death short-circuited my fantasies of tormenting him. I was jealous too, echoing Anne Sexton in her poem, “Sylvia’s Death”:

Thief!—
how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.

A time to kill, and a time to heal.

Oddly enough, or maybe not so, I sought my own name on the Wall. Like Komunyakaa, my name had not been inscribed, but I, too, saw my face.

A time to hate, and a time to love.