by Mark Kessel
I stood frozen at the front door staring at the brass numbers 235. I removed the form from my jacket to check.
It was only 8 a.m. on July 30 and already a bead of sweat formed on my brow. My perspiration wasn’t simply due to the summer heat. Would I accurately recall the two sentences I rehearsed over and over again in the car? “I regret to inform you that Corporal DeSantis was injured in a battle in Vietnam and evacuated to a military hospital in Saigon. He died of his wounds on July 29th.”
The call from the Pentagon had only told me that DeSantis was twenty-one-years old, his rank, and few details of his death. But he was somebody’s son, maybe a brother, somebody’s friend. I wasn’t much older than him.
There were voices behind the door, the voices of people whose lives would be changed forever after hearing my words. My stomach tightened. I worried I might get sick but the queasiness passed quickly. I reread the now moist paper, tucked it in my jacket, counted to three, and pressed the button.
The door swung open and there stood a tall man wearing slippers, a white undershirt, and wrinkled, paint-stained, khaki pants. “What the…” he began, and then gaped at me.
I swallowed hard and finally spoke, “Are you Corporal DeSantis’ father?”
A voice surprisingly soft coming from such a big man, asked me to come in. We entered a dark dining room and he flipped on a switch near the door and turned toward me. The room brightened and facing him I immediately started to say, “I regret to inform you that your son” when a short woman wearing a faded pink terry cloth bathrobe burst into the room screaming, “no, no, no.” In an instant she raced across the room to a cabinet, grabbed one decorative plate after another and hurled each to the floor with such violence that shattered pieces flew across the room and struck the bottom of my trousers. The husband ran towards her and wrapped his arms around her. With his head he motioned for me to leave.
I walked out the door. My legs were trembling and her screams still echoed in my ears.
***
In early July 1966, after I graduated from law school, I married Helene and rented a studio apartment in Manhattan. A week later, I was commissioned an Army Captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. While awaiting orders for my permanent duty, I was assigned to the legal office at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. My responsibilities were mostly to prepare simple wills for servicemen going off to Vietnam.
Like all junior officers, my name was added to a duty roster to notify the next of kin of a soldier’s death. I didn’t think much about it until late in the evening on a Friday. I was about to walk out of the office when the phone rang. I looked at my watch and realized I had lost track of time. I answered expecting my wife to ask me when would I get home, but instead the call was from the Pentagon. After confirming I was the notification officer on duty, the caller gave me the bare details to provide to the father listed as the next of kin and directed me to make the notification the next morning. But none of that had prepared me for the crashing china and the screaming that was to come.
After the notification, I was totally drained on the drive back to Fort Hamilton. I was startled when the driver said, “Captain, we’re here.” Only then did I notice the paperwork on the seat beside my jacket. I had forgotten to leave the parents the telephone number to contact for assistance in administrative and funeral details.
Thankfully it was a Saturday and I didn’t have to go to the office. I drove home feeling unsettled.
When I entered the apartment, Helene looked at me. “How did it go?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not? It might help if you did.”
Dropping my hat and jacket on a chair, I sank down next to her on the couch. She put her arm around my shoulder. Not looking at her, I recounted my nervousness and my fear of not remembering the simple sentences. But then said, “Nothing prepared me for the mother screaming and smashing plates like someone gone mad.”
She sat silently for a few minutes and stood up.
“Why you?”
“It was my turn.”
For the next several weeks I avoided talking about DeSantis even with close friends. It took a while for me to realize that none of the officers in my office had ever spoken about their next of kin notifications, although they must have performed this duty.
At home I avoided answering the phone hoping, if Helene answered, it might shield me from an assignment. If forced to pick up the phone myself, I would ask who was calling almost in whisper.
My mood swings worried my young wife. She urged me to talk more about my experience but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Our dinners were mostly eaten in silence, and she started to meet with friends in the evenings. I was sleeping poorly, dreaming badly, and my behavior was putting enormous pressure on our three-month old marriage. Neither of us deserved this, especially Helene.
***
The next notification came three weeks later. I was reading an article in the newspaper, “Marines in Fight Near Buffer Zone,” when the phone rang, startling me. Helene was out of the apartment so I answered. It was the Pentagon.
I jotted down that Second Lieutenant William Sherman was killed in Vietnam, the details of his death, the name of his wife, listed as the next of kin, and her residence.
At the address, I walked down the sidewalk leading to the building’s entrance and pressed the intercom button. A woman’s voice answered and I identified myself. She buzzed me in and met me at the door to the apartment.
“Hi, I’m Libby, Ann’s mother-in-law. You must be one of Bill’s friends.” I didn’t respond.
She led me into the living room which had an expansive view of the Hudson River. The sun glistening through the large windows blinded me for a moment.
Offering me a seat, she said, “How do you know Bill?”
I sat still with my hat in my lap; my mouth was dry. My instructions were only to relate the death to the next of kin, which was not the deceased’s mother. I simply asked if Ann would be joining us. Just then an attractive woman in her mid-twenties entered the room smiling and I immediately stood up. She was holding the hand of an adorable blond haired, blue-eyed toddler wearing pajamas with an imprint of a monkey’s face and sucking on a pacifier. The child must have just woken from a nap. Ann sat down with the child in her lap next to her mother-in-law and adjusted her skirt.
“So, what’s the news from Bill?”
Trying to control my voice, I barely managed to complete the details of his death. The color drained from Ann’s face and she started to sob. The little girl looked up at her. Bill’s mother started to cry, leaned over and put her arms around Ann, hugging her.
I sat still not knowing what more to say or do. I slowly stood and said softly, “An officer will contact you to render assistance” and placed the assistance form on the coffee table in front of her.
Searching for the hallway to the elevator, I found myself in the dining room. It contained a large painting of Bill, Ann, and their daughter. I walked the other way and closed the apartment door behind me.
Back at the apartment, Helene switched off the television. After I hung up my jacket and hat, she came over to hug me but said nothing. After a minute or two, seated on the couch, I fought back tears and recounted what happened, leaving out no detail: the horror I felt telling a wife and mother, expecting a friend, of the death and the beautiful child that was now without a father. I said, “Can you even imagine a complete stranger suddenly showing up at your door to tell you I was dead?” Her eyes were already filled with tears.
This experience, like the DeSantis one, continued to make me more short-tempered with Helene. Not able to sleep some nights, to avoid waking her but nowhere to go in our studio apartment except the bathroom, I would sit on the toilet seat and read. A glass of Jack Daniels often helped to drive away the memories. Other times in bed I would whisper to God, “Please let this be my last.”
In mid-September I received my permanent assignment to the Defense Appellate Division in Arlington, Virginia. To my great relief, this assignment did not require me to make notifications. My anxiety and sleeplessness were subsiding. But not completely. When they recurred, I woke up sweating and not able to fall back to sleep.
Eleven months passed. The buildup in Vietnam continued to accelerate and officers like me were receiving deployment orders for Vietnam. Every day when the mail was distributed, I anxiously waited to see if my orders arrived. On December 19, a letter from the Pentagon was handed to me. It directed me to report to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to be the legal officer of a brigade to be deployed to Vietnam in March.
The order granted me a week’s leave to get my affairs in order. The following day at the personnel office at the Pentagon a deployment form was handed to me to complete. On it was a box to check that I had all my requisite vaccinations, space to insert an address where my paycheck was to be sent, and a box to check that I had a will and its location. On the last item on the form, I had to designate my next of kin. My hand trembled as I filled in Helene’s name.
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Mark Kessel served as an officer in the Army and some of the contents of this fiction is inspired by true events while he waited to be admitted to the JAGC.
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