Earl Morgan built a life-sized toy army tank for his boys, Tommy and Scott, in the summer of seventy-one. A rope ladder on the side led up to the top hatch door, and another led down into the hull which had benches, windows, and a rudder for the main gun made from welded pipe scraps. Tommy and Scott helped paint the tank army green, and their mother Joyce mounted a flag, half as big as the tank, on the back. On Memorial Day, Joyce and Earl Morgan rolled the tank out of the garage down the driveway with the boys marching behind. The neighborhood kids and even some of the dads walked over to play war, and families from other neighborhoods drove by just to see the spectacular tank which sat in their driveway all summer long.
Just before dawn on August thirtieth, my mother stuffed a gasoline-soaked rag into a Seven-up bottle and set the tank on fire. She walked back home and watched it burn from the picture window until it collapsed in on itself, then picked up the phone: “I’d like to report a fire,” she said. She changed her clothes, smoked a cigarette, then woke up dad.
***
My sister and I had been forbidden to play in the tank. My mother said that war wasn’t a game, and it was disrespectful to real soldiers, especially to her brother, Uncle Bobby, who’d been dropped into the jungles of Vietnam for search and destroy missions just a few months before. My mother said the jungles were so thick that poison was used to clear them. I imagined snakes dropping from ancient trees and booby traps and quicksand. I’d only known the soft, young trees that grew in our well-tended lawn, their slim branches like my own little bones.
That summer, my sister and I wrote letters to uncle bobby. I told him how we missed sitting out back at night with the citronella candle and the stars and him playing Brand New Key on the guitar. I didn’t mention that we still went outside at night and that my mother put a chair out for him anyway because she said it was kind of like a prayer even though she didn’t believe in God. We sent him care packages too—chocolate chip cookies, Marlboros, Playboy magazines, and gum. My mother even saved enough Top Value Stamps to trade in for a transistor radio she tucked into one of the boxes that we hauled off to the post office where on one occasion we ran into Joyce Morgan.
“Don’t they have supplies at camp?” Joyce asked.
“It’s a war, Joyce.” my mother said. My sister and I glanced up at Joyce Morgan whose face turned red. My mother turned to us, “Don’t you ever play in their God-damned tank.”
I couldn’t admit to my mother that I had played in their tank. That I’d climbed the ladder to the top hatch and dropped down into the hull. That on humid days, it smelled like turpentine and earth. That Joyce Morgan handed us Twinkies and Hawaiian Punch through the cut-out windows. I certainly didn’t want her to know that Tommy Morgan had kissed my cheek during a thunderstorm then shoved me out the window when his friends came over, or that when I shot the main gun, I pretended to be Anthony J. DeLorenzo, the soldier whose name was engraved in tiny letters on my POW bracelet.
The neighbors just weren’t fond of my mother, especially that summer. She painted flowers on the trash cans, she recycled glass bottles, she did Transcendental meditation, but worst of all, she hosted Women Strike for Peace meetings on Thursday nights which meant cars lined up on our neat, suburban street. Joyce and Earl Morgan kept watch in their driveway next to the formidable tank as the ladies parked, ready to scold anyone whose tires got too close to their azaleas.
We sent two more packages off to Vietnam that summer before Uncle Bobby wrote back and said the rats had eaten the cookies and that his squadron had suffered several casualties. A last-minute “bird swap” spared him his life but not the horror of having to identify the remains. Ronald Jackson’s face was unrecognizable, he said, but his dog tags still hung around his neck. Uncle Bobby wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Booker Jackson about the act of heroism that had led to their son’s death which, he promised them, had been peaceful. My mother sobbed as she read the letter to dad. I prayed that Uncle Bobby’s squadron had tanks.
***
On the last Saturday of August, just before I would start second grade, the ladies from Women Strike for Peace came over with casseroles and coffee cakes and Jello molds and books. Some brought their husbands and children too, and they all took turns hugging my mother. The women took over the kitchen to set up a buffet then arranged the flowers and telegrams we’d received. They gathered in the living room in their usual circle of mismatched chairs and thumbed through the books to find readings for Uncle Bobby’s service, and someone gave my mother a little blue pill for her nerves because she could barely speak above a whisper.
Something woke me up just before dawn the next morning. I waded through a waft of lilies that made me dizzy and found my mother in the living room staring out the big picture window at the Morgan’s driveway. It was still dark, but she was already dressed. I looked out the window just as the flaming top hatch door of the Morgan’s tank blew clear across their yard and into ours like a shooting star. I winced as it seared the trunk of our young white birch tree before landing on the dewy grass just a few yards from the window where we stood. I reached for my mother’s hand.
