and then to set out across the wilds of Kew Gardens.
Even a make-believe adventure like a dash into the snow is better than no adventure at all, but Hill is no Walter Mitty. His work routinely involves dealing with “vindictive, cunning, violent thieves,” and the danger is not a cost but a bonus. “I think the real reason Charley volunteered for Vietnam,” remarks one friend who has known him since they were both teenagers, “is that he finally figured out that nobody gets killed playing football.”
If Prince Valiant and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe shared custody of a single body, the amalgam might resemble Charley Hill.
Hill’s father was a farmboy from the American Southwest, his mother a high-spirited Englishwoman who trained as a ballerina but then joined Bluebell Kelly’s troupe of high-kicking dancers. (In an old Gene Kelly movie called
Zita grew up in a great, sprawling house that overflowed with visitors. (Her husband-to-be was one of them, a young Army Air Force officer whom she first saw playing chess with her father.) P. E. T. Widdrington was a rector in the Church of England and a Fabian socialist, “a showman and a show-off,” in his daughter’s words. G. K. Chesterton was a frequent visitor, George Bernard Shaw an occasional houseguest and the cause of much giggling among the children because of his scraggly beard and his preference for sleeping on the floor rather than in a bed.
It was a charmed and glittery life. One day at H. G. Wells’s house, when she was six, Zita was told to prepare for a special treat.
“Zita, I’d like you to meet Charlie Chaplin.”
A small, nondescript man drew near. Zita burst into fits of weeping. “He’s
Even today, at eighty-seven, Zita retains the manner of a precocious child blurting out naughty and “forbidden” remarks, secure in the knowledge that she is too adorable to be rebuked. She is a formidable storyteller who basks in the spotlight. She tells of swimming in the Mediterranean sixty years ago with Didi Dumas, a handsome young Frenchman who was testing an underwater breathing device that he was working on with another young man, named Cousteau. She tells war stories—about her arrest (on trumped-up charges) for running guns to Greece, the jail cell she was thrown in, her escape on foot across France. She tells of a beau’s death in the war in a plane crash (this was before Charley’s father), “the great tragedy of my life.”
Charley Hill was raised on such gripping and harrowing tales, though his own childhood was more prosaic. His father, Landon Hill, was an Air Force officer who later switched over to the National Security Agency. Zita spent her married life dragging her family from one dreary assignment to another. “Dayton, Ohio,” she sighs theatrically. “Oh, it was absolutely dreadful.”
Charley, perpetually the new kid in town, attended perhaps a dozen schools in all, in Texas and London and Colorado and Frankfurt, Germany, and Washington, D.C. (Decades later, he still recalls the name of the bully who beat him up when he showed up in San Antonio, age seven, fresh from England, chirping away in a funny accent and decked out in wool hat, long socks, and short pants.) Growing up became one long exercise in sizing up new acquaintances and learning how to fit in with the locals.
Charley is proud of his mismatched ancestry, “log cabin on one side and knight of the realm on the other.” He prizes a collection of ancient family photos that show his American forebears standing proudly in front of a rude cabin in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. Better yet, in Hill’s eyes, a great-great-grandmother on his father’s side was a full-blooded Cherokee, so he can claim
Landon Hill’s story was markedly less cheery. He emerged from World War II physically unharmed but psychically scarred. He had been one of the first American soldiers at Dachau, for instance, and the scenes he witnessed there—Landon supervised the unloading of railroad cars crammed with dead bodies—haunted him for the rest of his life. “One of those really bright people who couldn’t cope with life,” in Charley’s view, the war hero became an alcoholic. On a December day in 1966, drunk, he stepped out of a taxicab in Washington’s Dupont Circle and slammed the door on his coat. The taxi sped off and dragged him to his death.
Half a year later, Charley Hill volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He likes to boast that he comes from a long line of soldiers, and it doesn’t take much coaxing to start him reciting the roll. The list begins with his father, and, if he includes ancestors on both sides of his family, stretches back through the War of 1812 and the French and Indian Wars. Earlier than that, the trail is murky, but the first of Hill’s soldier forebears fought in a border skirmish in Scotland around 1400 and even made a cameo in “The Ballad of Chevy Chase.” Charley quotes the lines with glee: “and good Squire Widdrington, though in woeful dumps, for when his legs were smitten off, he fought upon his stumps.”
Hill is forever screeching his car to a halt to read aloud a plaque to fallen heroes or to enjoy a melancholy stroll through a military cemetery. He opposed the Vietnam War, but he craved the adventure and the danger. And since the fighting was going on in any case, it seemed unfair to leave it all to the poor and the poorly connected. In a burst of “sophomoric idealism,”
Hill dropped out of college and went off to war. “Anyway, I
Hill found himself the lone college boy in a platoon of poor blacks and rural whites. Twelve of the fifteen men in his squad were killed or wounded. Hill survived his tour in the jungle unhurt, and he learned what it was like to come under fire and hunt an enemy who melted away into the night.
He learned, as well, something about himself that he very much wanted to know. The journalist Michael Kelly, who was killed while covering the war in Iraq, once remarked that many men “go to great lengths in life to not find out the answer to the question, How brave am I? War presents you with specific opportunities to find out the answer to that question…. The question is asked for you and answered for you, in front of you and in front of other people. It’s interesting, because you see it in all the people around you and you see it in yourself. And that’s knowledge you have for the rest of your life.”
Kelly may have been right that most men do not want to know how brave they are, but Hill craved that knowledge. Curiously, though, he passed his self-imposed test but found he drew little comfort from that success. Physical bravery turned out to be just a fact, like being six feet tall or having brown hair. Moral courage—the strength to obey one’s conscience in the face of opposition—was rarer and more admirable. Kelly, it turned out, had asked the wrong question.
Vietnam abounded in moral choices. After one raid on an enemy camp, Hill and two fellow soldiers found the camp abandoned but for a wounded old man, a Montagnard who had presumably led North Vietnamese soldiers through the mountain passes. Hill’s two companions wanted to shoot the man, but Hill stepped in, sparing the prisoner’s life. Eventually a captain turned up and ordered the wounded man evacuated by helicopter. The next time there was a firefight, one of the thwarted soldiers warned Hill, he’d get even with him.
When his tour of duty ended, Hill left November Platoon and returned home to Washington, D.C. At loose ends, and sobered and dismayed by what he had seen, he was without a plan for what he would do next. It would not be too much to say that art saved him.
“They were showing that wonderful series put together by Kenneth Clark,
