Undimmed by Human Tears
The first thing he had noticed about his father that day had been his beard, or the lack thereof. Black and scruffy, peppered with streaks of gray. Anthony had been sixteen then, shaving fairly regularly to avoid looking like his father, since he’d always been reminded of their resemblance to one another. Maybe as a freshman, as he was growing into his features, he would have taken it as a compliment—their shared height, just shy of six feet, the bushy eyebrows that feathered into their temples, the lopsided smirk weighed down by a dimple. But now, unconsciously outlining his own jaw, all he could focus on was that prickly stubble, dark enough to match the bags slouching beneath his eyes at five in the morning.
His father, David, was a proud member of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, one of the first American combat troops that would arrive in Vietnam. When he was younger, Anthony hadn’t understood exactly what his father was doing in the Marine Corps, but he had always been reassured with a noogie or a pinch of his cheeks that his dad was one of the good guys, like Superman or Captain America. Though it hadn’t been his finest hour, all of his tantrums paid off and he was gifted with crayons and markers, the like of which produced elementary-school level illustrations of intense battle scenes set in monster-infested jungles. His dad was distinguishable in these pictures by the dusty, olive green uniform Anthony had seen laid out on the ironing board in the laundry room, brandishing a poorly-drawn gun and always smiling widely next to a pile of stick figures with copious amounts of blood leaking from their bodies, tongues lolling out of their mouths and Xs over their eyes.
Those were the drawings his parents had been happy to stick to the fridge, letting him think that his father was off on some heroic pursuit, fighting bad guys in some far off land. Those were the days when he could be blissfully ignorant about who was allowed to live or die.
But he was no longer commissioning portraits of patriotism in third grade arts and crafts. He was in high school now, in Mrs. Pierce’s second period history class where everyone whispered about what was happening in Vietnam. Nam, as his father called it, before taking another swig of his beer and launching into another tirade about the threat of communism while Jesus looked down from the crucifix on the living room wall. With the assistance of the television, a recent fixture in his house, he was starting to look closer at what was happening around him. More importantly, he had realized his father was no hero to him. Certainly not one who dragged him by his ear out of the house to go to church, or forced him awake at five AM to train in the park across the street, or yelled at him until his face was scarlet, bulging with veins.
But that day, when his father’s beard had been shaved down close to his face, and he’d looked like a completely different man, had been the last day that he had been shaken awake at five in the morning, and the last time Anthony had seen his father before he was sent to fight in Da Nang.
In many ways, his father’s absence was a blessing. There was no one to scream at his mother for cooking the casserole too long, or to push him around when the last of the beer bottles rolled down the hallway and shattered outside the front door. There was a period of holding their breath before Anthony and his mother finally exhaled and learned that they could experience some peace, even while the world was waging wars everywhere. Huddled in front of the TV with their dinner every night, they became more aware of injustice together, knowing it was the only thing that equalized the people who did not look like them. With his mother’s support, he became more and more active in his high school, joining clubs and becoming friends with the people whose beliefs were as strong as his. He’d grown comfortable with his father’s absence, but in the back of his head, there was a small, quivering seed that would sometimes bloom into a twisted, intrusive flower, questioning his father’s role in all the military strikes and bombings he was protesting.
Periodically, he would thrust his hand into the mailbox and find a battered envelope that had traveled across the Pacific Ocean, bearing stamps of Ho Chi Minh with devil horns and his eyes scribbled out. One haphazardly folded letter was addressed to his mom, while the other was for him.
Anthony,
Hope school is well. Are you ready for the SAT? Sandra from church knows a good tutor, her son scored 2250 last year. I told your mom all about it. Are you trying out for any sports? I didn’t train you for nothing, you know. It’ll look good on college applications. Have you even started looking at colleges yet? Nothing in California or New York, of course, the Democrats have completely taken over with their anti-war propaganda. Don’t let it get to your head, son. You’re smarter than them. I know you’ll make the right choice.
Sooner or later, all of his dad’s letters were shoved into a shoebox underneath his bed, next to the stash of weed he’d bought off a guy from his AP Chemistry class. Even from over eight thousand miles away, he still acted like he knew what was best for Anthony. Always the same, presumptuous tone, baiting him into yet another one of their arguments. Anthony never took the bait, and instead scribbled back whatever his father wanted to hear in between rolling joints at midnight, and the next day he’d cough up a couple dollars at the post office to send the conversation back to Vietnam.
This stilted correspondence continued throughout his last two years of high school, and although he didn’t bother with sports or following up with the tutor—2000 out of 2400 was good enough for him—Anthony did find comfort and community in a group of friends that would religiously watch the news and paint posters to hold when they snuck into Kansas State University protests, with the college students.
When he’d heard of the huge protest that had happened in San Francisco in April of his senior year of high school, he completely ignored his father’s admonishings and wanted to commit to a college in California, somewhere in the Bay Area where people cared more about the war. His cousin Juliette lived there and went to UC Berkeley, and she’d sent him letters about Coretta Scott King speaking at the protest, raving about all the people who had gone and the reporters who had been there from all the major news stations.
In Kansas, most, if not all of his neighbors were proud to support the war. They had arrogantly waved their flags during the Fourth of July that year, while Anthony and his friends had done their best to ignore them in the park. He’d been careful not to debate any of them or mention anything about war unless he was at school, and even then some kids on their high horse would still get into fights about it.
Even though his mother was supportive of him, she still was hesitant to let him go out of state for college.
“Anthony, I simply don’t get paid enough at the diner to send you away to California! And you know how your father feels about it,” she’d huffed one night after dinner, stacking their plates in the sink.
“What’s he gonna do? Tell the Commandant his son is a communist threat and then come back to throw me down the stairs?”
“Don’t talk about your father like that. He might have…unconventional methods of discipline, but he still has a say in where you study. It’s his money,” she said, glowering as she vigorously scrubbed crusted pasta sauce off a fork, and that was the end of the conversation.
As a compromise, he had to choose a college in the Midwest. Though he was tempted by the allure of a big city like Chicago, he settled on Kent State because he knew there were a lot of political groups there. After picking up some shifts shoveling popcorn and sweeping floors at a theater downtown, he was able to pay for about a third of a ‘64 Ford Mustang, a graduation present from his dad. Soon he had packed his things and was finally on the highway to Ohio.
At first it had been awkward to introduce himself to the boys in his dorm in Engleman Hall, but in no time at all their uncomfortable introductions gave way to late night card games fueled by copious bottles of Guinness and packs of Pall Mall, which then turned into a reliable friend group he was happy to waste his hours with.
Half of them had girlfriends back home in Des Moines or St. Louis, but Anthony realized the label was only temporary by the way his friends shamelessly flirted with the girls in the dining hall. With how quickly people seemed to be pairing up during the first two years of college, he wondered if he was destined to die alone, or if there was anyone secretly interested in him. As it turned out, there was.
Her name was Allison. She was in his philosophy class, despite the fact that she was a freshman and he was a junior. He found out through a friend of his that she was an honor student, which accounted for her frequent participation during class.
The only issue on his end was his horrible anxiety. Despite his extroverted nature when it came to politics, he had never been very good at introducing himself to new people, let alone girls.
One day they were paired together for a project on liberalism. Luckily for him, she turned out to be more of an extrovert, and carried most of the conversation.
“So where are you from?” she asked, flipping through the pages of their textbook for the section on political equality.
“Uh, Emporia. Kansas,” he coughed out. “What about you?”
“Cleveland,” she said.
“Here? Or in Texas?”
“Here,” she said with a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “It’s an easy enough mistake. There’s Cleveland, Tennessee too. But I went to high school in Silver Spring, Maryland. The summer before I came here, my family moved to Churchill, Pennsylvania.”
“That’s a lot of moving around. Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio again…” he put his pencil down and leaned back in his chair, staring out the window behind her in the upper floor of the library. “I’ve been in Kansas my whole life, but I’ve always wanted to live in another state.”
She put down her pencil too, and closed her textbook. “Where?”
“California.”
Allison laughed out loud, then realized her mistake too soon and covered her mouth. Anthony surprisingly found himself transfixed by her wide, warm brown eyes, and the dark eyelashes batting back at him.
“Sorry, I just think it’s funny because everyone says they want to go to California.” She punctuated her derision with a roll of her eyes, but her eyes glowed mischievously.
“Well I do. I’ve never seen the ocean.”
“There’s loads of other places to see the ocean besides California. Like the Italian coast, or the Caribbean.”
“I thought we were talking about moving somewhere in America.”
She shrugged. “That’s boring, so I’d rather talk about traveling. Keep up, Anthony.”
Over time she told him more about her family. She was Jewish, but she didn’t understand a word of Hebrew, no matter how hard she tried. She envied her younger sister Laurel for it. Her mother’s name was Doris Lillian Levine, and her father was Arthur Selwyn Krause. She loved The Beatles and The Beach Boys, so she was saving up for a record. She was allergic to cats but she desperately wanted to hold one because she thought they were so cute. Her favorite subject was history but she thought philosophy was neat.
“One day, after we see the ocean in California, because you’re super lame and boring, we’ll go to Greece and see what those ancient goblins were really harping on about,” she said while they studied in the grassy Commons for a test on Socrates and Plato.
They started walking to class together, going on dates together, and eating dinner together with their respective families. His mother came over for Hanukkah and learned how to play the dreidel game. Allison’s family came over for Easter and painted eggs.
But what Anthony enjoyed most about spending time with Allison was getting to go to club meetings together, especially SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. They were there when Nixon approved Operation Breakfast, and the communist supply routes and base camps were bombed. They were there when Melvin Laird started talking about Vietnamization. They were there when Ho Chi Minh died. They were there when the rest of America found out about the Mai Lai Massacre. They showed up every week without fail, meeting new members and becoming more and more involved. Despite the incompetency of their leaders and military— Anthony begrudgingly thought of his father and the pile of stupid letters back home—they tried to remain hopeful and positive. They painted signs which they proudly waved during protests, and read The Communist Manifesto together.
“What language was this originally in?” Anthony asked her as they laid in bed, smoking a bowl while Allison scrunched up her nose at the smell.
“You are so high. And dumb,” she said, pushing him away as he leaned in for a kiss. “And smelly.”
“Yes I am,” he said, smirking into her shoulder. “So what was it? Russian?”
“Get off me you whore,” Allison giggled, trying to push Anthony away as he started to tickle her. “Fine, it was German! Have mercy! I’m sorry I called you a dumb, smelly whore!”
Anthony grinned in triumph. “Danke Fräulein.”
They’d been seriously dating for almost two years by the time Anthony was about to graduate. He was a communications major, and had landed an internship with the Chicago Tribune. Allison was studying history, so she wasn’t sure exactly where she’d end up, but Anthony was sure she’d be able to find a job in Chicago so they could live together.
As fate would have it, she wouldn’t even get to finish her sophomore year.
Three days prior to her death, he’d been in Allison’s dorm, listening to Nixon’s announcement of the invasion of Cambodia. Neither of them could believe what they were hearing, after the blatant censorship of the war’s deadliness in the news. They knew they weren’t hearing the full story, and they knew they had to do something about it.
There were protests in the Commons, right at the center of campus, with at least five hundred students in attendance. He watched as a group of graduate students came forth with a shovel, digging a decently sized grave in which they buried a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Anthony and Allison were among the group of SDS members cheering and pumping their fists behind them, smiling grimly, knowing they could appreciate the irony of it all.
They hadn’t gone to the bars that night, afraid that something would happen, and their fears had come true. Some people had kicked over a garbage can in the middle of the road and set fire to it. They had even gone as far as breaking store windows, before the cops had arrived and arrested more than a dozen of them. The whole thing was over by three in the morning, but the two of them knew that that was only the beginning.
The mayor of Kent, Leroy Satrom—“A paranoid old sack of shit is a better title for him,” Allison once said, although she would deny she had ever called him that if Anthony brought it up around her moderately strict father — couldn’t do his job right, and apparently thought the whole incident was plotted by radicals, so he declared a civil emergency and contacted the governor of Ohio, James A. Rhodes, who was an old conservative sack of shit, also according to Allison, and he deployed the National Guard.
The following day, Anthony and Allison remained on campus, despite initially wanting to help clean up after what had happened downtown. As they walked back from dinner in the Student Center in the evening, they noticed twice as many people that had gone to the protest the day before, shouting and pumping their fists at the ROTC building.
They’d maintained a fairly healthy distance from the rest of the crowd, but had still been close enough to see the building go up in flames. Later, from the window of Anthony’s dorm, they watched as the firefighters arrived to put out the blaze, and the same rioters slash and pull at the hoses dousing the flames. About thirty minutes later, the National Guard arrived and the instigators dispersed, fleeing across the grass.
“Everything is fucked, isn’t it?” Allison asked beside him, turning her face away from the glow of the flames and the rising smoke in the window’s reflection.
Anthony found himself nodding wordlessly, his mouth set in a grimace. He’d recognized a couple faces from both crowds, but because of how dark it was, he didn’t know just how many students were there, and who the rest of them were. They could’ve been anybody. They probably didn’t even go to Kent State, because no one he knew at the club meetings had ever been that violent.
The following day, the National Guard were all over campus, posted at the doors to nearly every building, stopping students to see their identification. Anthony did his best to steer clear of them, knowing they were just looking for someone to publicly punish and humiliate. He could see it in their arrogant faces. It was the same prideful smirk his father wore whenever he won an argument. Even if it had been years since he’d seen him, that look, and the beatings that followed, haunted Anthony as he walked away from them, trying not to make eye contact. There were at least a thousand of them, maybe a couple hundred more than the crowd of arsonists.
Anthony wondered if his father bullied other soldiers, or worse, Vietnamese people, into doing what he ordered. He didn’t want to think about it too much, because he knew there was no point asking a question he already knew the answer to.
He heard Governor Rhodes had flown in on a helicopter and shown his dirty, sack of shit face—another moniker coined by Allison—at a press conference immediately after what had happened last night. On the radio, he called for law and order, calling Kent State students bums and likening them to Brown Shirts.
Allison’s jaw had quite literally dropped to the floor when she heard that. “He…he thinks we’re like the Nazis? Really?”
Anthony had switched off the radio. There was no point listening to whatever garbage the governor was spewing. The main thing was that they were both safe. Allison’s father had called not once, not twice, but five times to make sure that they were both holed up in the dorms on campus, since he’d heard that there was a group of students who were blocking traffic after a meeting with officials had gone wrong and none of them had shown up.
The Guard had been there too, to take care of the problem. They used bayonets and tear gas, forcing the crowd to disperse and driving them out of the streets, while some were arrested.
“Really? And we’re supposed to be the Nazis?” Allison had made a point of saying again, crossing her arms while Anthony scoffed, smoking a cigarette out the window, the smoke disintegrating in the night breeze.
And then the next day came. The final day.
Anthony knew it was better to stay inside, but he had gone against his judgment and decided that he was tired of waiting for the Guard to leave, that he wasn’t going to be intimidated anymore.
Hand in hand with Allison, he’d joined the massive crowd of three thousand students in and around the Commons. Only a couple hundred were actively protesting, having heard that Nixon was expanding the war. They were posted by the Victory Bell, so that’s where Anthony and Allison stood, chanting with them.
Anthony could feel the anger vibrating within each and every student. He knew that he didn’t need to hear them to know that their screams were full of anguish and outrage. He didn’t need to see them to know their faces were contorted with pain. It was the same expression on his face, the same unbridled fury coursing through him as he screamed.
Allison, with her small mousy frame and soft spoken voice, was screaming too, daring the National Guard to do something about it.
And then they did.
At first there was the tear gas. He always thought that if it came down to it, after forcing to train with his father in the early morning back in high school, that he’d be able to withstand anything the police or the military did. He would be invincible, just like his father, and they would never be able to hurt him.
“Fuck!” he heard himself cuss, dropping to his knees as his eyes began to water, and his vision blurred. Allison screamed and he blinked back tears, wiping his eyes on his sleeve over and over again to be able to see. He stood up and whirled around, twisting his head in every direction to pick her out among the crowd, despite the fact that she had been right next to him.
He kept his eyes dry long enough to locate her and grab her hand, running up Blanket Hill to Taylor Hall. He tried to avoid the burning sensation in his eyes, lungs, and nose, coughing like a veteran smoker as he tried to sprint.
Allison’s panting beside him was like a rhythmic metronome, gasping for breath as the Guard marched up the side of the hill, blocking off the students in front of them.
The Guardsmen were aiming their rifles at them now. Anthony wasn’t sure if it was even possible to hide. There was nowhere to go; it seemed like every building within their radius was flanked by soldiers, obstructing any other escape routes.
All he seemed to be able to do was keep running. The grass and the concrete and the Guards and the sky all blended into one color through his tear-gassed vision. There was Allison beside him, struggling to keep up with him, but still running for her life. He’d never felt such fear in his life, not even when his father had drunk his way through all their bottles of Johnnie Walker, sporting that stupid smirk, getting ready to fight his way through another pointless debate.
Finally, they made it to the Pagoda. In hindsight, he realized just how stupid he had been, running to some place out in the open, where it had been so easy for the bullets to reach them.
When it finally happened, it sounded like a flurry of explosive arrows had been released into the sky, bursting like fireworks. Only, it wasn’t the sky, and it wasn’t night.
It was barely midday, as he recalled, the sun shining down on them as the gunshots were fired. Anthony had about three seconds to register the sound of it before he was hit in the thigh and he fell to the ground.
Beside him was Allison, also falling to the ground, blood soaking through her shirt and her left sleeve. All he could think about was how red it was, and how quickly it was spreading across her chest. His heartbeat grew louder and louder in his ears, pumping the same blood that was seeping through his jeans.
The tears fell of their own accord as he whimpered, his free hand applying pressure on the wound so she wouldn’t lose any more blood. He didn’t care about his own wound, or the fact that the gunshots were still echoing around them.
All he could think about was Allison. Allison Beth. That was her middle name.
He’d asked her once if Beth meant anything, and she said it was the Hebrew word for “house”.
“If you could live anywhere, where would you live?” he had asked her. “And what would your house look like?” They were holed up in his room again, passing a joint between them.
“Hmm. If I could live anywhere, I would pick…Ireland, I think. Probably because of how green everything is there.”
“And your house?”
She shrugged, blowing smoke onto him, and now it was his turn to scrunch up his nose at the smell and wave it away from his face. “I don’t really care, as long as you’re there. And also a little poofy cat that stays within ten feet of me.”
“House and home are two different things, Miss Krause,” Anthony had said, mocking their old philosophy professor.
She scowled. “Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. But if you really care so much, probably a cottage by the ocean. It won’t be silly, boring California, but the ocean is still nice.”
Allison was drowning in her own blood, breathing in shallow gasps as she tried to talk. “It’s…not…s-s-safe…for you…here.”
Anthony placed his hand in hers. “Shhh, it’s okay. Some—Someone must’ve called an ambulance. Yes. They’ll be here soon. It’ll all be fine.”
She shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I—It’s too late.”
“It’s not. They’ll be here.”
“No,” she sobbed. “But I’ll see you soon. In California, remember?”
All he could do was nod.
“Yes, California. The ocean is still nice.”
Originally from Dublin, California, Angelia D’Souza is a junior double majoring in English and Cultural Anthropology at Creighton University. She is additionally hoping to pursue a certificate in Creative Writing, and has plans to conduct research through the university. Angelia is inspired by religion, nature, death, and philosophy, as well as broader historical issues of race, war, and social justice. She hopes you enjoy her work!