“Have you thought about the Peace Corps?” Mrs. Hoyt asked me. She said she’d counseled one young man—also an English major—to apply to the Peace Corps. He’d been accepted as an English teacher in Tanzania. It was a pity, she admitted, that the Red Chinese had sent about four hundred “advisers” to Tanzania in the summer of ’65; the Peace Corps, naturally, had withdrawn in a hurry. “Just think about it,” Mrs. Hoyt said to me. “Even Tanzania is a better idea than Vietnam!”
I told her I’d think about it; but I thought I had so much time! Imagine this: you’re a university senior, you’re a virgin—do you believe it when someone tells you that you have to make up your mind between Vietnam and Tanzania?
“You better believe it,” Hester told me.
That was the year—1966, in February—when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began televised hearings on the war.
“I think you better talk to Mrs. Hoyt,” my grandmother told me. “I don’t want any grandson of mine to have anything to do with this mess.”
“Listen to me, John,” Dan Needham said. “This is not the time to do what Owen Meany does. This time Owen is making a mistake.”
I told Dan that I was afraid I might be responsible for sabotaging Owen’s desire for a “combat arms designator”; I confessed that I’d told Colonel Eiger that Owen’s “emotional stability” was questionable, and that I’d agreed with the colonel that Owen was not suitable for a combat branch. I told Dan I felt guilty that I’d said these things “behind Owen’s back.”
“How can you feel ‘guilty’ for trying to save his life?” Dan asked me.
Hester said the same thing, when I confessed to her that I had betrayed Owen to Colonel Eiger.
“How can you say you ‘betrayed’ him? If you love him, how could you want what he wants? He’s crazy!” Hester cried. “If the Army insists that he’s not ‘fit’ for combat, I could even learn to love the fucking Army!”
But everyone was beginning to seem “crazy” to me. My grandmother just muttered away at the television—all day and all night. She was beginning to forget things and people—if she hadn’t seen them on TV—and more appalling, she remembered everything she’d seen on television with a mindless, automatic accuracy. Even Dan Needham seemed crazy to me; for how many years could anyone maintain enthusiasm for amateur theatricals, in general—and for the question of which role in A Christmas Carol best suited Mr. Fish, in particular? And although I did not sympathize with the Gravesend Gas Works for firing Mrs. Hoyt as their receptionist, I thought Mrs. Hoyt was crazy, too. And those town “patriots” who were apprehended in the act of vandalizing Mrs. Hoyt’s car and garage were even crazier than she was. And Rector Wiggin, and his wife, Barbara … they had always been crazy; now they were claiming that God “supported” the U.S. troops in Vietnam—their implication being that to not support the presence of those troops was both anti-American and ungodly. Although the Rev. Lewis Merrill was—with Dan Needham—the principal spokesman for what amounted to the antiwar movement within Gravesend Academy, even Mr. Merrill looked crazy to me; for all his talk about peace, he wasn’t making any progress with Owen Meany.
Of course, Owen was the craziest; I suppose it was always a toss-up between Owen and Hester, but regarding the subject of Owen wanting and actively seeking a combat-branch assignment, there was no doubt in my mind that Owen was the craziest.
“Why do you want to be a hero?” I asked him.
“YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND,” he said.
“No, I don’t,” I admitted. It was the spring of our senior year, 1966; I’d already been accepted into the graduate school at the University of New Hampshire—for the next year, at least, I wouldn’t be going anywhere; I had my 2-S deferment and was hanging on to it. Owen had already filled out his Officer Assignment Preference Statement—his DREAM SHEET, he called it. On his Personnel Action Form, he’d noted that he was “volunteering for
oversea service.” On both forms, he’d specified that he wanted to go to Vietnam: Infantry, Armor, or Artillery—in that order. He was not optimistic; with his number-two ranking in his ROTC unit, the Army was under no obligation to honor his choice. He admitted that no one had been very encouraging regarding his appeal to change his assignment from the Adjutant General’s Corps to a combat branch—not even Colonel Eiger had encouraged him.
“THE ARMY OFFERS YOU THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE—THE SAME CHOICE AS EVERYONE ELSE,” Owen said. While he was hoping to be reassigned, he would toss around all the bullshit phrases favored by the Department of the Army Headquarters: RANGER TRAINING, AIRBORNE TRAINING, SPECIAL FORCES TRAINING—one day when he said he wished he’d gone to JUMP SCHOOL, or to JUNGLE SCHOOL, Hester threw up.
“Why do you want to go—at all?” I screamed at him.
“I KNOW THAT I DO GO,” he said. “IT’S NOT NECESSARILY A MATTER OF WANTING TO.”
“Let me make sure I get this right,” I said to him. “You ‘know’ that you go where?”
“TO VIETNAM,” he said.
“I see,” I said.
“No, you don’t ‘see,’” Hester said. “Ask him how he ‘knows’ that he goes to Vietnam,” she said.
“How do you know, Owen?” I asked him; I thought I knew how he knew—it was the dream, and it gave me the shivers.
Owen and I were sitting in the wooden, straight-backed chairs in Hester’s roach-infested kitchen. Hester was making a tomato sauce; she was not an exciting cook, and the kitchen retained the acidic, oniony odor of many of her previous tomato sauces. She wilted an onion in cheap olive oil in a cast-iron skillet; then she poured in a can of tomatoes. She added water—and basil, oregano, salt, red pepper, and sometimes a leftover bone from a pork chop or a lamb chop or a steak. She would reduce this mess to a volume that was less than the original can of tomatoes, and the consistency of paste. This glop she would dump over pasta, which had been boiled until it was much too soft. Occasionally, she would surprise us with a salad—the dressing for which was composed of too much vinegar and the same cheap olive oil she had employed in her assault of the onion.
Sometimes, after dinner, we would listen to music on the living-room couch—or else Hester would sing something to Owen and me. But the couch was at present uninviting, the result of Hester taking pity on one of Durham’s stray dogs; the mutt had demonstrated its gratitude by bestowing upon Hester’s living-room couch an infestation of fleas. This was the life that Hester and I thought Owen valued too little.
“I DON’T WANT TO BE A HERO,” said Owen Meany. “IT’S NOT THAT I WANT TO BE—IT’S THAT I AM A HERO. I KNOW THAT’S WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO BE.”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“IT’S NOT THAT I WANT TO GO TO VIETNAM—IT’S WHERE I HAVE TO GO. IT’S WHERE I’M A HERO. I’VE GOT TO BE THERE,” he said.
“Tell him how you ‘know’ this, you asshole!” Hester screamed at him.