The Turtle Warrior Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  October 2000

  June 1967

  1976

  1982 and 1983

  1998

  2000

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  The Turtle Warrior

  “Finely observed ... simultaneously exhilarating and harrowing.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Ellis exhibits a painful brilliance in this debut of a Wisconsin boy’s coming of age.”

  —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  “Ellis’s debut is affecting and gorgeously poetic.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Elegantly written and sharply observed.”

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  THE TURTLE WARRIOR

  Mary Relindes Ellis’s stories have been anthologized in Uncommon Waters: Women Writing About Fishing, Bless Me, Father: Stories of a Catholic Childhood, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and Gifts of the Wild: A Woman’s Book of Adventure. She lives in Hammond, Wisconsin.

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004 Published in Penguin Books 2005

  Copyright © Mary Relindes Ellis, 2004 All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works: “A Song for What Never Arrives” from Star Quilt by Roberta Hill (Holy Cow! Press, 1994). Copyright © 1994 by Roberta Hill. .

  “Avoiding News by the River” by W. S. Merwin. Copyright © 1967 W. S. Merwin. Reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.

  “The Sound of Silence” by Paul Simon. Copyright © 1964 Paul Simon. Used by permission of the publisher, Paul Simon Music.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-00693-1

  1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975—Wisconsin—Fiction. 2. Wisconsin—Fiction. 3. Boys—Fiction. I. Title. PS3605.L468T’,6—dc21 2003057167

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  For my brother

  Paul Alexander Ellis

  Acknowledgments

  This is a book of fiction, hence any resemblance to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental. The VFW Hall on East Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee and the Heron Reservation are completely fictional and were created for the sole purpose of the novel.

  While the battle of Khe Sanh actually did take place in late January 1968—the beginning of the Tet Offensive—and proceeded to escalate as the fighting continued toward Hue, the characters are fictional as are some of the events created around the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The soldiers are all fictional characters and hence their opinions and feelings concerning the Vietnam conflict and more importantly the immediate battles they fought in are also fictional. While there were combat chaplains in Vietnam, the chaplain in this book is fictional and his predicament and actions that deviate somewhat from official military policy are those of a fictional priest/chaplain suffering a crisis of faith. What is not fiction is that the battle of Khe Sanh, like the rest of our involvement in Vietnam, was terrible and lives were lost on both sides of the conflict. What is not fiction is that the United States’ role in Vietnam will forever haunt every American, especially those men that fought and survived, and the families of those men who were killed. We tragically fail, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

  In addition to my own experience as a girl whose older brother served in Vietnam and who endured a long night with my siblings and mother concerning that wounded brother, I am very indebted to many books that were important to me in my research. I tried to study the Vietnam War from many perspectives. Those books are:

  Dispatches, by Michael Herr; The End of the Line, by Robert Pisor; Fire in the Lake, by Frances FitzGerald; Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps, by Allan R. Millett; The Pacific War, by John Costello; Operation Buffalo: USMC Fight for the DMZ, by Keith William Nolan; Combat Chaplain: A Thirty-Year Vietnam Battle, by James D. Johnson; Chaplains with Marines in Vietnam, 1962-1971, by Commander Herbert L. Bergsma, CHC, U.S. Navy; Valley of Decision: The Siege of Khe Sanh, by John Prados and Ray W. Stubbe; Free in the Forest: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, 1954-1976, by Gerald Cannon Hickey; The Montagnards of South Vietnam: A Study of Nine Tribes, by Robert L. Mole; Reading Athena’s Dance Card: Men Against Fire in Vietnam, by Russell W. Glenn; The Battle of Leyte Gulf: 23-26 October 1944, by Thomas J. Cutler; Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples, edited by Jean Michaud; Vietnam: A History, by Stanley Karnow; Our Vietnam, by A. J. Langguth; The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social and Military History, edited by Spencer C. Tucker; They Called Them Angels: American Military Nurses of World War II, by Kathi Jackson; A Chorus of Stones, by Susan Griffin; No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II, by Diane Burke Fessler; Ojibway Heritage, by Basil Johnson; and Farming the Cutover; A Social History of Northern Wisconsin, 1900-1940, by Robert Gough. I am also grateful for the terminology provided by the Vietnam Project.

  A very special thank-you to the editor and staff of Leatherneck magazine (the official magazine of the United States Marine Corps), for their thoughtful and sensitive answers to painful questions I posed regarding the care taken to identify those Marines killed and the Marine Corps policy of notifying the families of those deceased men; and to Professor Edward Griffin, for his reading of the manuscript and for his own perspective based on military service.

  Parts of the novel also appeared in slightly altered form in The Bellingham Review and Glimmer Train. I received wonderful support and encouragement from the owners and editors of Glimmer Train, Linda B. Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown, who have created an enduring literary journal that embraces stories that might not otherwise get published.

  I am grateful to Marly Rusoff, my agent, for her enthusiasm and belief in this book, and to Kathryn Court and Ali Bothwell, at Viking Penguin, for their editorial
help, support, and enthusiasm. Many thanks as well to Steven Barclay and Kathryn Barcos, for their advice and unfailing kindness; and to William Merwin for his generous advice.

  I should like to thank the following for their faith, love, and continual support: Peg Johnson, Heather McIver, Dawn York, W Kent Krueger, Trudy Lapic, Scott and Lisa King, Craig and Sal Johnson, Deb Swackhamer, Jan Philibert, Gwen Ellis, Paul Ellis and Viola Kien, Barbara Stoltz, Tracy Ellis and family, Edith Mucke, Betty Johnson, Alan and Jeannie Steffen, Theresa Durand, Patricia Galiger Schoenborn; my “other” parents, Darlene and Miles Galiger; Brian and Jody Hayman, William and Margaret Hunt, Doris and David Preus, Dan Guenther and Margaret Pennings, Patti Brierbauer, and Donna Cotter. I received mentoring and guidance as an undergraduate from Professors Charles Sugnet and Michael Dennis Browne, and more recently, extraordinary assistance from Professors Shirley Nelson Garner, Toni McNaron, and Madelon Sprengnether. Also, a special thank-you to the staff and the chair, Kent Bales, of the English Department at the University of Minnesota, and Margaret Yzaguirre of the College of Liberal Arts. I am also grateful to my mother, Relindes Catherine Alexander Berg, and all the women who helped raise me and who were/are warriors in their own right.

  Tragically, Tom Lapic, senior aide to Senator Paul Wellstone and husband to Trudy Lapic, died in the plane crash on October 25, 2002, and hence did not live to see this book, which he so supported and did not get to read in its entirety. But he knew the conflicts, philosophically and morally, concerning all the issues involved in this novel and worked constantly toward righting those wrongs until the day he died.

  The writing of this novel was assisted by the financial support of a 1997 Minnesota State Arts Board Grant.

  AVOIDING NEWS BY THE RIVER

  As the stars hide in the light before daybreak

  Reed warblers hunt along the narrow stream

  Trout rise to their shadows

  Milky light flows through the branches

  Fills with blood

  Men will be waking

  In an hour it will be summer

  I dreamed that the heavens were eating the earth

  Waking it is not so

  Not the heavens

  I am not ashamed of the wren’s murders

  Nor the badger’s dinners

  On which all worldly good depends

  If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything

  W S. Merwin

  October 2000

  HE STOOD NEXT TO HIS yard light and looked at his watch. It was 8:00 P.M., and he did not want to wait a moment longer, to cause them worry. He turned the light switch on and then off, waiting for a few seconds before doing it again: on and off. It was a signal to his younger neighbor that all was well at the Morriseau farm. A nightly ritual.

  It was dark and cold, but rather than go into the house, he leaned against the light post. Autumn again. It was the season in which the memories of his father were most visceral. His father had been dead for fifty years. Ernie was now seventy-six. Autumn made him more aware of his mortality, yet his chest swelled with excitement, with the change arousing his senses. The spice and funk of wet bark and wet leaves, the papery fertility of dried grass and the astringency of pine. The leaves like varying shades of fire. The first October storm that released them like smoke. The surprising loveliness of bare branches reaching upward as though the sky had pulled their shirts off to get them ready for bed.

  Autumn briefly transcended the truth of his age and allowed him to dwell in the memory of being a treasured late-in-life child. He had loved and respected his mother and father; had been the child of, and witness to, an extraordinary marriage. In trying to be what he thought was a good son, a citizen of the world, he had made choices that hurt his parents and caused them worry and pain, some of them inevitable but others selfishly ill considered. He hadn’t paid attention. He only half listened in the evenings when his father told stories and anecdotes while they did chores. Stories of his father’s life on the reservation, stories of why the moon was full once a month, why birds go south, the creation of butterflies. He understood and listened to his parents speak in what should have been his first language, Ojibwe. Ernie knew only a half dozen words, as his generation was not allowed to speak their native language in school. If he had listened more closely and learned, he might have solved the riddle that his father unwittingly left him with and that troubled him for years.

  They had been deer hunting that day and had stopped to drink some water and eat their packed sandwiches.

  “Spring,” his father commented out of the blue, looking up at the treetops, “is the season of women and birth. Fall is the season of men and hunting.”

  Ernie was sixteen then and did not think to question its meaning, but it was odd enough for him to remember.

  His father suffered a stroke two weeks after Ernie came home from fighting in the Pacific in 1944. Ernie had gotten married just before returning to Olina. Rather than have a honeymoon, he and his wife were suddenly faced with the responsibility of his family’s subsistence farm and the care of his aging parents as well. In those long days of work there never seemed to be time to discuss much of anything except what was necessary. He was hesitant to do so anyway; afraid that he might upset the old man by forcing him to speak when it was so difficult for his father to ask for the simplest needs and wants. His wife’s nursing of his father and her patience with the daily physical therapy required appeared to have nearly restored him. Just when it seemed his father had regained all of his speech and could walk without help, he suffered a fatal stroke one night in his sleep.

  Ernie told his mother, not long before she died two years later, what his father had said, in the hopes that she would know the intent of the words. Her usually good-humored face folded in confusion.

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what he meant.”

  He would have given anything to talk to his father again. To ask the older man if he had really understood what he had said: that women belonged to life and that men belonged to death and that men killed in the fall what women gave birth to in the spring. Even if it was not literally true, the metaphor was a terrifying one.

  He put his bare hands in his coat pockets and looked up at the night sky with its many stars and constellations. He shivered. Peace did not come with old age. The new millennium meant nothing to him. He and his wife had gone to bed early on New Year’s Eve, ignoring the national fear of being bombed, of terrorism striking anywhere and everywhere. They did not, as some of their neighbors did, buy cases of water, load up on canned goods, buy huge power generators, or turn their basement into a bunker. They slept, knowing that whatever would happen would happen regardless of what they did.

  His right hand fingered the handkerchief in his pocket. If he had learned something profound in his life, it was this: that to ask a question could be the most rebellious of acts and the most necessary. That allowing words to go unspoken could cause not only harm to oneself but harm to another.

  He tasted it every day in his mouth. As though he had bitten down on a prickly ash berry. The sudden infusion of wild citrus flavor before it numbed his gums and tongue. Not even water seemed to wash it away.

  Bitterness.

  June 1967

  SOMETHING NUDGED BILL WHEN THE firecrackers went off in the snapper’s jaws. It told him to pay attention to the queasy feeling in his stomach and remember. Bill saw his brother and his brother’s best friend, Terry, laughing at the turtle’s gaping mouth and mutilated jaws. His brother’s hand was clutched around a Pabst beer. Blood from his bitten thumb trickled across the blue ribbon on the brown bottle and dripped onto the sand as they stood on the shore of the Chippewa River near the old logging bridge.

  “Damn! That sucker nearly took my thumb off.” James raised his hand to his mouth and began licking the blood.

  “Don’t lick your own blood!” Terry said, his lips wrinkled with disgust. He took a swig of beer from his own bottle.


  “You lick it then!” James held out his bloodied thumb, taunting his friend.

  “Get away from me! I ain’t no vampire.”

  James walked toward him and jabbed his thumb into Terry’s face, causing him to back up awkwardly. The older boys jostled up the bank away from the river, shouting and laughing at each other.

  Bill watched them goof around for a while before turning his attention back to the snapper. It was a big female. She moved laboriously toward the river, her front claws digging into the sand to pull her forward. Her lower jaw dragged, and pieces of it fell away as she crawled. Then she stopped and dropped her head upon the sand. She made a strange noise. Not a cry like many other animals would make in pain. More like an anguished groan. Tears watered Bill’s eyes.

  Snapping turtles were like nothing else Bill knew. Not like humans or animals. Not even like their cousins the box and mud turtles. Snappers were sometimes algae-covered or muddy or even mossy-looking at times. They appeared ugly, wise, and ancient all at once. The combination lifted them to a transcendent beauty, an otherworldly magnificence that thrilled Bill. They were the nearest thing to a dragon that he would ever experience. They couldn’t move their bodies very fast on the ground. It was their heads and jaws that gave them their name. The head could suddenly shoot forward and snap down on prey with jaws that could not be pried apart. Bill liked to put his bare feet on top of the empty shells of the turtles his mother had used to make soup and feel with his toes the ridges and leathery points of the carapaces. Like most turtle shells, snapping turtle’s shells were not round but slightly oval, some of them with one distinct ridge running straight down the middle from the head opening to the rear of the shell, where the turtle’s tail protruded. He had picked the largest shell and asked his brother to drill a hole on the right and left side of the shell, where it was the widest to protect the vulnerable skin between the turtle’s front and back feet. Bill threaded and knotted one end of a rope through the one hole, then pulled the rest of the rope across the interior of the shell and through the opposite hole so that it was taut. He cut off the excess rope and knotted it. He could then insert his left arm up through the inside of the shell so that it functioned as a shield.