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BY PHILIP CAPUTO
Ten o’clock to two o’clock.
As far as the geometry
of fly-casting goes, that’s
all you need to know. The rod tip describes an arc from about
forty-five degrees above an imaginary plane extending forward
from your waistline—the ten o’clock position—to
about forty-five degrees behind—two o’clock.
There
are variations, nuances, but we won’t go into
those because this is not a treatise on fly-casting or fly-fishing.
This is about redemption, or more to the point, about a way
for the returning warrior, scarred body and soul, to find
redemption.
A psychologist would say “to reintegrate
himself into civilian society,” or some such; a guru
might speak of the “healing process.” I prefer “redemption.”
It’s
a search that goes back to the times when men fought in phalanxes,
with swords and spears and shields. In Book II of Virgil’s
Aeneid, Aeneas offers to carry his father, Anchises, out
of the ruins of Troy on his shoulders. But he asks Anchises
to carry their Penates—the family’s
household gods—because:
In me, it would be impious,
holy things to bear,
Red as I am with slaughter, new from war,
Till in some living stream I cleanse the guilt
Of dire debate and blood in battle spilt.
It is not that Aeneas
did anything wrong; he bravely defended his native Troy against
the invading Greeks. Nevertheless, he feels that as his deeds
have stained his hands with blood, so have they conferred
a moral taint on his soul. He is unfit to handle hallowed
objects until those blots are washed away.
The
redemption Aeneas seeks isn’t freedom from sin
and its penalties. Nor is it forgiveness or atonement. It
is instead a restoration, through a ritual cleansing, of
his flesh and spirit to a condition in which he is once again
fit to touch the sacred.
I believe an analogy can be made
with the modern warrior’s
quest for reintegration—not so much with civil society
as with himself. For the experience of combat causes a disintegration
of the self. I can best illustrate my meaning with a mention
of my own state of mind when I came home from Vietnam in
the summer of 1966.
I was suffering from what I called, in
A Rumor of War, “combat
veteranitis”: an intolerance of loud noises, an inability
to concentrate, alternating spells of depression and rage,
disturbing memories so vivid they weren’t really memories
but a re-living of firefights and ambushes, with all the
attendant emotions of fear and fury. I couldn’t sleep
at night without a light on and a loaded shotgun at my bedside.
Night, after all, was the time of maximum danger. So there
I was, lying in the same bed in the same room I’d occupied
as a kid in the same quiet Chicago suburb, but with a loaded
gun at hand. I was home. Except I wasn’t. In my mind,
I was still in the rank, black jungles, listening, watching,
waiting, on one-hundred-percent alert, my senses so keen
I swore I could hear the blood rushing through my veins.
I
recall going on a date to a Chicago restaurant called Papa
Milano’s. I was having a good time when, suddenly and
for no reason, a blind, cold rage seized me as I looked at
the other patrons, laughing, talking, stuffing their faces.
What right did they have to be enjoying themselves while
their countrymen fought and died in the Asian mud half a
world away?
I was, as it were, incarcerated in a cell of anger,
and I could not break out. I was afraid that at any moment
I was going to get up and smash somebody in the mouth, break
a bottle over somebody’s head. Abruptly, I paid the
check and told my date we had to leave. She looked at me,
baffled and frightened, as if she didn’t recognize
me. Indeed, I did not recognize myself. I thought I was going
crazy.
We
now have a name for this suite of symptoms—post-traumatic
stress disorder. I have some problems with that term: It
is too clinical, lifeless, and mushy, especially when compared
with the harsh directness of its World War I antecedent,
shell-shock. (Of course, shell-shock—a mental and physical
paralysis brought on by extremely heavy combat—is a
different thing altogether: It occurs during the event, not
afterward.) I also wonder if the delayed reaction to what
we generalize and euphemize as the “horrors of war” is
really a disorder. Maybe it is a perfectly normal reaction
to an experience so far beyond the usual as to be like a
trip to an alien galaxy, and not a pleasant one. Fact is,
I sometimes think that those who come home from a war and
pick up their lives as if nothing has happened are the ones
with the disorder.
In his novel of Vietnam, Close Quarters,
Larry Heinemann observes that first the war works on you,
then you go to work on the war. In battle, the soldier’s
moral being, his very character, is repeatedly violated by
the sights he is forced to witness, the bloody deeds he is
forced to do, the indignities and fear he is forced to suffer.
But the warrior is not, by training or nature (and his nature
is largely formed by his training), a passive victim. He
is an active agent. One way to end the “rape” of
his inner self is to learn to like it, to mesh with the madness,
to become one with it and, in a manner of speaking, fall
in love with the rapist.
Home from the battlefields, I felt as out of place as an
undomesticated pitbull at the Westminster Dog Show, a feeling
I’m sure was shared by many veterans. It seemed that
I knew things—about the human animal in general and
myself in particular—it would have been better not
to know; that I had seen things it would have been better
not to have seen; done things it would have been better not
to have done. Yet, a big part of me missed the war. Despite
all the fine principles I’d been taught in parochial
schools, I’d enjoyed it even as I hated it—the
danger, the hot adrenal rush, the killing. In combat, one
is both god and beast, which means one is no longer fully
human. A door had opened for me in Vietnam, and I’d
peered into the heart of darkness, and the heart was mine.
“All good things, from trout to eternal salvation,
come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come
easy,” wrote Norman MacLean in A River Runs Through
It. Art, he was saying, can save us, not for eternity but
for the here and now. Fly-fishing is an art, and a grace
of a certain kind comes by it. And so, in that summer of
1966, I decided to remove myself from civilization for a
little while and go into the woods to fish for trout. This
was to be the first step in a long journey toward self-reclamation.
To a degree, I was borrowing a page from The Big Two-Hearted
River, Hemingway’s great short story about his fictional
alter-ego, Nick Adams, who has come home psychically wounded
from World War I and retreats to the forests of northern
Michigan.
It had been a long time since I’d cast a fly
rod. Anyway, it seemed like a long time. I took mine out
of the attic and went to a park to practice. Fly-casting
is a lovely thing to watch when it’s done correctly;
it is truly poetry in motion. It requires some muscle; but
more, delicacy and coordination and a tranquil spirit. If
you are angry or upset or agitated, you will make a mess
of it. Whenever I see someone casting a fly rod really well,
I know I’m looking at
a person who is centered, calm, and in control.
Ten to two.
I stood in the park with the rod pointed at the
ten o’clock
position, my right arm partly extended and bent at the elbow,
my fingers around the cork grip, thumb on top. I held a loop
of line in my left hand. In fly casting, it is not the weight
of the lure that makes the cast but the weight of the line;
the average dry fly or streamer is not much heavier than
a grain of sand. This is the motion for what’s called
the single-haul cast. Really, it’s two motions, blended
smoothly into one.
First, as the left hand gives a smart but
economical tug to the line, the right arm snaps the rod upward,
stops when the rod is pointed directly overhead, and allows
it to drift back to the two o’clock position. The line
and the leader—a length of gossamer monofilament—unfurl
behind the angler on the backcast, or, as it’s sometimes
called, the “pull” phase of the entire cast.
Then the angler pauses for a fraction of a second, so line
and leader roll out straight. There should be no shock waves
in the line; it should look as taut as a telephone wire.
Then
comes the forward cast, or “push” phase.
With the line still in the air, the angler’s right
arm pushes crisply forward, maintaining the same plane as
on the backcast. As the rod tip approaches ten o’clock,
he tips his wrist ever so little, an inch at most, and stops
the stroke, releasing the loop of line in his left hand at
the same time. The line hisses through the air in the shape
of a “U” lying on its side. The energy stored
in the rod has been transferred to the line, so that, at
the very end, the upper leg of the sideways “U” flips
forward and gently drops the fly on the water, simulating
the delicate landing of a mayfly.
When making long casts,
let’s say beyond forty feet,
or when practicing, it is necessary to false cast; that is,
the fly is pulled into another backcast before it’s
delivered to its target. That’s what I was doing in
the park in Westchester, Illinois, that summer afternoon
forty-two years ago. Back and forth, back and forth. There
was a kind of hypnotic Zen to it. Back and forth. Pull, push,
ten to two, two to ten, all in a single fluid movement. Swinging
a tennis racket, golf club, or baseball bat was not nearly
as satisfying as casting a fly rod properly. The virtues
it called forth were the opposite of the warrior’s—gentleness
rather than brutality, serenity rather than fury.
A few days
later, I was near the town of Paulding, Michigan, fishing
Bluff Creek, a stream I had fished before I’d
put on a uniform and picked up a rifle. It was the living
stream in which I could begin to redeem my mind from its
captivity to the war. Bluff Creek was the color of strong
tea and flowed through silent forests of fir and spruce,
and just being there was a balm. I felt my old, pre-war self.
Standing in a deep, still pool formed by the pilings of an
abandoned railroad bridge, I cast a streamer back and forth,
back and forth, and eventually caught two big brown trout.
The catching of the fish wasn’t the point, however.
Doing it right required concentration. Therein lay the grace
granted by art: I couldn’t think about Vietnam. Those
obsessive memories of blood and fire were, for the moment,
forgotten.
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©2006-
2011, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8719 Colesville Road, Suite 100, Silver Spring, MD 20910