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Everything is Going to be Okay

By Lawrence Markworth

I joined the Navy days after the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of '62. I always thought I'd enlisted out of patriotic duty to save the world from Communism because I didn't have anything else to do. Never heard of Vietnam. Perhaps I was in denial of what lay ahead.

I loathed public school, concluding that college wasn't my cup of tea. My savior in high school was two and a half years of auto shop. All my other classes were a contemptible undertaking. I loved automobiles, and repairing them gave me a sense of accomplishment and pride. In my senior year, on the stage of the school auditorium, in front of all my classmates, I was awarded for being the top of my class in the auto shop. The prize was a new toolbox and tools. That ceremony and the day I graduated were my happiest times in high school. I still own that toolbox in a storage area behind my garage. It's no longer in use. I've tried to give it away, but I can't part with it.

The place I called home was not safe. As if I was Odysseus escaping the Cyclops Polyphemus on Sicily, I was out of there, running straight to the gates of hell, and I hadn't a clue. Until I got off the bus at the US Navy Recruit Depot San Diego, and everyone in authority was yelling at me, telling me I was a piece of shit. Then I knew I'd made a mistake. And when my company commander, a scrawny-ass fuck of a twisted Chief Petty Officer, hit me in the jaw while marching on the parade grounds, like a hard knock-on wood to each beat of his words: Markworth-you-start-off-a-left-oblique-on-your-right-foot, tears in my eyes from the pain and humiliation of each blow. Once again, I knew—I wasn't safe. Damn, I was angry. Hitting me was uncalled for; I'd had enough of that at home. What was the point? Just tell me what I did wrong, and I'll correct it. Yes, of course, I had the sense that if we were to go to war, I wouldn't be safe. I never dreamed my Navy superiors would violate my physical security.

While home on leave in '63, a week before my two-year deployment on the USS Castor in the South China Sea offshore Vietnam, my father had a heart attack. The thud of him hitting the floor woke me from a deep sleep. As I entered my parents' bedroom—not far from my father's hand—a burning cigarette scarred the hardwood floor where he had fallen. He wasn't breathing.

My sister and mother screamed, "Lawrence, do something!"

Emergency skills, drilled into my head during months of Navy training, kicked in. I performed CPR, he did not respond. I worked on him for what seemed like hours, but it was probably just a few minutes. The firemen arrived and asked me to leave the bedroom. I went into the living room and anxiously waited. Mom called our family doctor, and he arrived. He had saved my life when I was seven, corrected an appendectomy gone wrong just in time as a day later would have been too late. I felt his savior's presence. Then I heard Dad in a clear, understanding voice that I still recall as if it was just a few days ago.

"Lawrence, everything is going to be okay."

I ran into the room just as the firemen were covering his body and face with a blanket.

"No, no," I yelled, "he just spoke to me."

"I'm sorry, Larry. His heart probably arrested before he hit the floor. There's nothing else you could have done," the doctor said.

I didn't believe him. For over thirty years, I thought I had performed CPR incorrectly. I carried and owned that guilt.

The deployment offshore Vietnam on the USS Castor, a supply ship, was hell on water. Dealing with uncertain weather, from flat calm in extreme heat and humidity to typhoons with gale force winds with waves as big aircraft carriers. There were long hours on watch in the hot and humid engine room, repairing old and outdated electrical equipment always in need of maintenance, and hurry-up-and-wait when re-supplying ships in the South China Sea. It was called underway replenishment (UNREPS). Combat ships alongside us, often one on our port and one on our starboard simultaneously for hours, while we winched over on thick wire cables, cargo net after cargo net of toilet paper, mops, clothing, spare parts, etc. At UNREPS, you cannot leave your assigned station unless relieved by a shipmate. Often, these could be ten, twelve, or fourteen-hour assignments or longer.

During this time, I endured my grief for my father. Terribly homesick, missing California and friends and family and thinking, in a dark place, that I would never return home. Some tragedy would befall us, and I'd die on that godforsaken ship.

When onshore, I tried to drown my guilt and grief in beer, whiskey, and prostitutes. It did help when I was drunk and with the women, but the next morning, the pain would return, along with a miserable hangover. The next night, I'd do it again if we were in port and I had some cash.

While serving on the Castor, we changed homeports from Yokosuka to Sasebo, Japan, to be closer to the South China Sea and Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August '64. Nagasaki was an hour's train ride from Sasebo.

I had a good friend, a shipmate, David Nagai, a fellow electrician's mate who was Japanese American, born in a relocation camp in the US during WWII. He was keenly interested in Japanese history and insisted we visit the museum at ground zero in Nagasaki. I reluctantly agreed to go with him. Luckily, we were wearing civvies, not our dress blues, for it was only 20 years after the end of the war, and the wound of their gruesome defeat was still deeply embedded in the Japanese people.

I was not prepared for what I saw in the museum. Displays: beer bottles melted, in the intense heat of the weapon. Photos: children, women, men, skin gone, burned off. Shadows of human beings permanently inked on the side of a flashed-bleached white building; their bodies disappeared: melted, burned, or disintegrated. Photographs of blocks and blocks and blocks of rubble, nothing standing except one large concrete smokestack at the edge of town. I was overwhelmed.

Then, I saw an old, disfigured woman who could barely walk. She shuffled with her cane from one exhibit to the next; tears flowed, her bent spine forcing her focus on the floor. I walked in the opposite direction, another section of the museum. While I studied a display, a ghost slid up next to me. I glanced down at the old woman. With difficulty, she turned her head and looked up at me. Much of her face was missing. Her one eye burned into me as if to ask, "Why?"

My mind suddenly opened to questions. Did we commit an atrocity? Is this what we do to non-Caucasian peoples and nations, mostly civilians, who challenge our authority and military might? Do our dead Vietnamese civilian casualties look like this? And you, Lawrence Louis Markworth, my sad, grieving sailor, are part of this killing machine. In the middle of my four-year enlistment, this was the beginning of my hatred of war, my moral injury. This was the end of innocence, the seed of peace planted in the warrior.

Somehow, I dropped the museum incident into the cellar of my denial, in good company with my childhood trauma and the grief for my father. In moments of weakness, when the cellar door threatened to open, and the demons peeked in on my true self, I would slam it shut again with alcohol and sex.

Even my father's speaking to me, after his death, while his soul was leaving his body, that "everything was going to be okay" was a truth he knew then. No, not in one year or five, but I discovered his truth eleven years after his death. Fifty years ago, when I was twenty-nine and she was twenty-one, I met the love of my life. We're still together.

Yes, Dad, everything is going to be okay.

A chapter from my in progress "Rowing Through a Sea of Rubble: a Warrior's Journey Home." A memoir of loss, love and forgiveness.

Lawrence Markworth is a Vietnam Veteran, retired librarian, author, and dream group facilitator. He holds a B.A. in geography and a Master's in library science from UCLA.