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In the fall of ’65, when we returned to Durham for our senior year, there were already protests against U.S. policy in Vietnam; that October, there were protests in thirty or forty American cities—I think Hester attended about half of them. Typical of me, I felt unsure: I thought the protesters made more sense than anyone who remotely subscribed to “U.S. policy”; but I also thought that Hester and most of her friends were losers and jerks. Hester was already beginning to call herself a “socialist.”

“OH, EXCUSE ME, I THOUGHT YOU WERE A WAITRESS! Owen Meany said. “ARE YOU SHARING ALL YOUR TIPS WITH THE OTHER WAITRESSES?”

“Fuck you, Owen,” Hester said. “I could call myself a Republican, and I’d still make more sense than you!”

I had to agree. At the very least, it was inconsistent of Owen Meany to want a combat-branch assignment; with the keen eye he had always had for spotting bullshit, why would he want to go to Vietnam? And the war, and the protests—they were just beginning; anyone could see that.

On Christmas Day, President Johnson suspended Operation Rolling Thunder—no more bombing of North Vietnam, “to induce negotiations for peace.” Was anyone fooled by that?

“MADE FOR TELEVISION!” said Owen Meany. So why did he want to go there? Did he want to be a hero so badly that he would have gone anywhere?

That fall he was told he was Adjutant General’s Corps “material”; that was not what he wanted to hear—the Adjutant General’s Corps was not a combat branch. He was appealing the decision; mistakes of this kind—regarding one’s orders—were almost common, he claimed.

“I THINK COLONEL EIGER IS IN MY CORNER,” Owen said. “AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, I’M STILL WAITING TO HEAR ABOUT A COMBAT BRANCH.”

By New Year’s Eve, 1965—when Hester was making her usual statement in the rose garden at 80 Front Street—only 636 U.S. military personnel had been killed in action; it was just the beginning. I guess that figure did not include the death of Harry Hoyt; “in action” was not exactly how poor Harry was killed. It had been just like another base on balls for Harry Hoyt, I thought—snake-bit while waiting his turn with a whore, snake-bit while peeing under a tree.

“JUST LIKE DRAWING A WALK,” said Owen Meany. “POOR HARRY.”

“His poor mother,” my grandmother said; she was moved to expand upon her thesis on dying. “I would rather be murdered by a maniac than bitten by a snake,” she said.

And so, in Gravesend, our first vision of death in Vietnam was not of that standard Viet Cong soldier in his sandals and black pajamas, with something that looked like a lampshade for a hat—and with the Soviet AK-47 assault rifle, using a 7.62mm bullet, fired either single-shot or on full automatic. Rather, we turned to my grandmother’s Wharton Encyclopedia of Venomous Snakes—which had already provided Owen and me with several nightmares, when we were children—and there we found our vision of the enemy in Southeast Asia: Russell’s viper. Oh, it was so tempting to reduce the United States’ misadventure in Vietnam to an enemy one could see!

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Harry Hoyt’s mother made up her mind that we were our enemy. Less than a month after the New Year—after we had resumed our bombing of North Vietnam and Operation Rolling Thunder was back on target—Mrs. Hoyt created her disturbance in the office of the Gravesend local draft board, choosing to use their bulletin board to advertise that she would give free draft-counseling advice in her home—sessions in how to evade the draft. She managed to advertise herself all around the university, in Durham, too—Hester told me that Mrs. Hoyt drew more of a crowd from the university community than she was able to summon among the locals in Gravesend. The university students were closer to being drafted than those Gravesend High School students who could manage to be accepted by even the lowliest college or university.

In 1966, two million Americans had so-called student deferments that protected them from the draft. In a year, this would be modified—to exclude graduate students; but those graduate students in their second year, or further along in their studies, would keep their exemptions. I would fall perfectly into the crack. When draft deferments for graduate students got the ax, I would be in my first year of graduate school; my draft deferment would get the ax, too. I would be summoned for a preinduction physical at my local Gravesend draft board, where I had every reason to expect I would be found fully acceptable for induction—what was called 1-A—fit to serve, and standing at the head of the line.

That was the kind of thing that Mrs. Hoyt was attempting to prepare us for—as early as February 1966 she started warning the young people who would listen to her; she made contact with all of Harry’s contemporaries in Gravesend.

“Johnny Wheelwright, you listen to me!” she said; she got me on the telephone at 80 Front Street, and I was afraid of her. Even my grandmother thought that Mrs. Hoyt should be conducting herself “in a manner more suitable to mourning”; but Mrs. Hoyt was as mad as a hornet. She’d given Owen a lecture at the monument shop when she was picking out a stone for Harry!

“I don’t want a cross,” she told Owen. “A lot of good God ever did him!”

“YES, MA’AM,” said Owen Meany.

“And I don’t want one of those things that look like a stepping-stone—that’s just like the military, to give you a grave that people can walk on!” Mrs. Hoyt said.

“I UNDERSTAND,” Owen told her.

Then she lit into him about his ROTC “obligation,” about how he should do everything he could to end up with a “desk job”—if he knew what was good for him.

“And I don’t mean a desk job in Saigon!” she said to him. “Don’t you dare be a participant in that genocide!” she told him. “Do you want to set fire to small Asian women and children?” she asked him.

“NO, MA’AM!” said Owen Meany.

To me, she said: “They’re not going to let you be a graduate student in English. What do they care about English? They barely speak it!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“You can’t hide in graduate school—believe me, it won’t work,” said Mrs. Hoyt. “And unless you’ve got something wrong with you—I mean, physically—you’re going to die in a rice paddy. Is there anything wrong with you?” she asked me.

“Not that I know of, ma’am,” I said.

“Well, you ought to think of something,” Mrs. Hoyt told me. “I know someone who does psychiatric counseling; he can coach you—he can make you seem crazy. But that’s risky, and you’ve got to start now—you need time to develop a history, if you’re going to convince anybody you’re insane. It’s no good just getting drunk and smearing dog shit in your hair the night before your physical—if you don’t develop a mental history, it won’t work to try to fake it.”

That, however, is what Buzzy Thurston tried—and it worked. It worked a little too well. He didn’t develop a “history” that was one day longer than two weeks; but even in that short time, he managed to force enough alcohol and drugs into his body to convince his body that it liked this form of abuse. To Mrs. Hoyt, Buzzy would be as much a victim of the war as her Harry; Buzzy would kill himself trying to stay out of Vietnam.