I don’t think any of us who saw that image has ever forgotten it: the rail-thin general gripping the snub-nosed pistol, the defiant prisoner’s teeth clenched, his bushy black hair standing up straight and unvanquished even as the bullet smashed into his temple, the blood spray just starting at the camera-frozen instant of death.
I didn’t really want to go to Vietnam, but we still envied those hotshot writers and photographers who flew around the world, covering the really big stories, while we were stuck writing up local antiwar rallies and chasing school board scandals.
Pru and I also had babies in common, one apiece, tho hers almost never happened. Pru’s live-in boyfriend Hal was a quiet, sweet guy, who had dropped out of college and was on the way to becoming a carpenter, tho I don’t think he realized it at the time. He just knew he was hopelessly bad at the intellectual pretensions and palaver of most of the rest of us who lived in the shadow of Harvard, which spread from a jumble of plain red brick buildings a mile or so away. That difference of outlook was a source of continuing but low-key tension between him and Pru.
So when Pru turned up pregnant, it was both an accident and a problem. The accident was easy to figure: birth control worked almost all the time. But almost isn’t always. The problem was that even covering local news stories kept us on the go and away from home a lot. And while Pru liked my wife Tish, who was then mostly taking care of our daughter, Pru was determined not to give up journalism to spend several years changing diapers and being captive to a schedule of nursing, naps, and toddler tantrums.
Which meant she decided to have an abortion. In those days, abortion was still outlawed in most of the country, including Massachusetts. But just a year earlier, it had been made legal in New York state. So what was a crime in Cambridge could be done freely in Albany, a three-hour drive to the west.
At her stage, it was supposed to be relatively quick, or so we had been told. A kind of vacuum cleaner would suck Pru’s uterus clean, leaving behind only a small jar of bloody mush.
Of course, Pru agonized about it. She talked to me, she talked to Tish, she talked to her other friends. I was not a fan of abortion, then or now, but agreed that in the end it was up to her.
One morning she and Hal climbed into their old Volkswagen Beetle and got on the Massachussetts Turnpike, Albany-bound. We figured they’d be back in a day or two.
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