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This chapter of Images from the Otherland provides some observations on the combat experience and covers my final duty station and my decision to resign after my four-year obligation had been completed. The scene then shifts to 20 years later when Vietnam seemed to revisit me in the form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The following passage is excerpted from the chapter.
". . .I was scheduled to be admitted on a Monday. The day before, I had dropped off my daughter Wendy at her college dormitory. We said good bye, and she wished me luck in my operation. As I drove away, I kept looking at her standing on the sidewalk, thinking for the first time about the seriousness of the operation, about the nature of the real problem that was now causing my exhaustion. And suddenly I was struck by a tremendous feeling of grief at the thought that I might never see Wendy again. The next day, I celebrated the Marine Corps birthday in the hospital with a last meal of liquids and gelatinous thing. On Tuesday they put me out for several hours, split me open to find three flaming tumors. Excising these and taking a string of lymph nodes for good measure, they repackaged everything, tied it back together, and allowed me to drift back from drug heaven. So I had a touch of cancer, a little non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. But my surgeon had done a very good job, removing all the bad and suspect parts. And all the tests to find traces elsewhere came up empty. I still had the luck. Several months later, having recovered pretty well from the trauma of the surgery, I was sitting at my desk, at work on my computer. The music from my radio was playing softly in the background. I was half listening to the news on the hour, when I heard parts of a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The report claimed that there was an unusually high occurrence of lymphomas in marines who had been stationed in the northern provinces of South Vietnam during the period I was there. So here I am with an incurable form of cancer. My oncologist tells me that no one knows what causes this variety. Though dormant now, she tells me the statistics indicate it will most likely become active again, perhaps in a few years. When it does, it will be amenable to treatment and will probably go again into an inactive state. Was it caused or triggered by my tour of duty and contact with Agent Orange? Am I still in touch with that part of my past? What difference does it make anyway? Sorry 'bout that. . . ."
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