Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is a recurring historical presence in the Birdsey family’s life, shaping Ma’s efforts to protect her sons, Ray’s hostility toward antiwar dissent, and Dominick Birdsey’s later understanding of fear and loss. Rather than appearing only as a distant political conflict, the war enters the family through a neighbor’s death, the choice to send the twins to college, and the veterans Dominick encounters in a psychiatric hospital. Its meaning shifts with perspective: Ray sees protest as a threat to military duty, while Ma and, later, Dominick recognize the human costs the war carries into ordinary homes.

The War at the Family’s Door

Billy Covington, a boy four years older than Dominick and Thomas Birdsey, had spent time at their home after school because his father had left and his mother worked downtown. As children, the twins played with him while he took the role of Superman, completing his costume with a bath towel Ma pinned around his neck. She pitied his circumstances and contrasted his absent father with the dependable father she believed her own sons had. The memory later acquires a painful irony: Billy, once imagined as nearly invulnerable in play, enlisted in the Air Force and was killed during a bombing raid near Haiphong.

Billy’s death affected Ma profoundly. After the memorial service, she cursed the war in the car, startling the twins, who had never heard her speak that way. She placed Billy’s photograph on her dresser among family portraits, prayed novenas for his soul, and was moved by the sight of his grieving mother passing the house. Dominick recalls that, at sixteen, he considered Ma’s mourning excessive. Only later, after Thomas’s troubles began, did he understand Billy as a warning: a boy just ahead of her sons in age whose fate made their own vulnerability imaginable. If even the child who had played Superman could be killed, the twins could be killed too.

Protection, College, and Competing Beliefs

The prospect of the Vietnam War gives Ma’s practical decisions a protective meaning. When she gave up saving green stamps for a German grandfather clock and instead used them to obtain a typewriter for the twins, Dominick understood her emphasis on their future success as also a concern for their safety. College, in his retrospective account, represented a way to keep them away from the war. The typewriter thus carries more than academic promise: it belongs to Ma’s effort to create a safer future for her sons.

Ray’s response to the war differs sharply. A veteran of World War II and Korea, he believed draft dodgers should be shot and later threatened the twins with severe punishment if they became involved with drugs. His military service and forceful views make the family’s argument about college more than a financial dispute. Ray opposed paying two tuition bills and distrusted colleges, while Ma’s support was tied to the possibility that education might shield the boys from a fate like Billy’s. The war therefore presses on family life even in decisions that appear to concern schooling, money, or discipline.

Memory and the Return of the Conflict

The war resurfaces in Dominick’s recollections of college, when he feared that Thomas’s academic difficulties could leave him vulnerable to being sent to Vietnam. Dominick also remembers resisting the role of constant caretaker: he did not want to carry Thomas to class or make him study. The fear of the war sits beside the strains of brotherhood, making Thomas’s precarious position feel consequential beyond the immediate question of grades. In this memory, the possibility of military service intensifies Dominick’s sense of responsibility without resolving his resentment or exhaustion.

Years later, at Shanley Memorial Hospital, Dominick sees patients on Unit Four wearing camouflage and learns that about half the ward’s population consists of Vietnam casualties. A staff member explains that some veterans are there not because of criminal histories but because Veterans Affairs hospitals are overcrowded and other programs have closed. The war’s aftermath appears here not as a single battlefield event but as a continuing institutional burden: veterans need care, and the available systems are strained. Dominick’s question about another impending conflict, Operation Desert Shield, prompts the staff member to criticize the noble language surrounding war and the country’s apparent readiness to forget what came before.

Public Meaning and Private Cost

The Vietnam War’s meaning is contested again when Dominick and Ray travel to the hospital after Thomas has amputated his hand in an act he intended as a protest against the standstill over Kuwait. Ray objects to a newspaper story that presents Thomas’s action as an antiwar sacrifice, insisting that Thomas was mentally ill and did not understand what he was doing. Dominick argues that Thomas believed the gesture might make political leaders notice and reconsider. The exchange does not settle whether the act should be understood as protest, illness, or both; instead, it exposes the gap between Ray’s distrust of antiwar symbolism and Dominick’s willingness to recognize an intention within Thomas’s impaired understanding.

Across these episodes, the Vietnam War links distinct kinds of vulnerability: Billy’s death, the twins’ imagined exposure to combat, Ma’s efforts to protect them through education, and veterans’ later need for care. The novel also gives the war a delayed narrative force. Dominick’s youthful annoyance at Ma’s grief becomes intelligible only after he has seen his own family endure prolonged suffering. The conflict remains present through those memories and consequences, even when the immediate public attention has moved on.