Memorials and days

Glory and gore and little more

This is fiction. It is based on stories from veterans I’ve been honored to know.

Dear Bill,

How is Vietnam, Fuzz Nuts?

I am fine. Thanks for mailing me the really cool coins to add to my collection. Hey I bought a stupid rambler with my grocery store job money and pinstriped it like it was the Batmobile. It’s really neat looking!

You think you got problems? Ha ha. Our Prom is coming soon and I have this monster zit right in the middle of my forehead. I look like a cyclops. I could frost a cake with it!

Miss you, bro. Come home safe.

Love,

Dean

Obnoxious Puke

Bill called me “Obnoxious Puke” as a term of endearment. Bill was a Combat Medical Specialist, a medic, in Charlie Company and a troublemaker. We were the sons of a Master Sergeant and Master Sergeants squeeze out men who are their worst nightmares, rebels with discipline.

Being a senior in high school and watching Cronkite every night Vietnam was was front and center in our home. That year my best friend, Eric, lost his dad, a fighter pilot, when he was shot down “over there”.

I worried about Bill all the time. Unlike Claudia.

I never worried about my cousin, Claudia, the Air Force nurse, when she went to Nam. This was years before Bill was shipped there. Claudia had classic Irish features, a face like a TV star, platinum white hair, green eyes, legs like a showgirl and a mouth like a sailor. Claudia and her legs stopped by on her way to Vietnam and to this smitten slack-jawed seven-year old she was Judy Jetson in a uniform. “Can I have a bite of your macaroni and cheese? Don’t worry your little head about me, Dean. I’ll be safe behind the lines.”

I was a squirt but I knew everything there was to know about war because I had watched all five seasons of “Combat”, starring Vic Morrow, the most Sgt. Rock actor there ever was and I was pretty sure in Vietnam there weren’t any lines to be safe behind.

Today Claudia’s a grandmother in Maine. “How many lives you suppose you saved?”

“Every last one.”

When I told her she was my childhood crush she put her hand on her hip and wagged her finger at me. ”It was that blue Air force skirt. I was a hot cookie.”

The year she came home was the same year Bill shipped out.

The nightmares about my brother came almost every night.

Nightmares about cargo planes filled with flag-draped coffins flying in the night sky over my head with the stars on their flags floating up off their caskets up to the stars above.

Nightmares about finding mutilated soldiers left by the Viet Cong.

Nightmares about Bill, shot, dying in some jungle, calling out for mom with me running and running to him. I could never reach him.

I imagined him dying the way my uncle Ken did when he was killed on D-Day. The instant the landing craft’s gate dropped Captain Ken Featherstone was pelted with German machine gun fire. I imagined uncle Ken clutching his rifle and his rosary, calling out for his mother, our sweet grandmother, Effie, as he sank under the waves.

Effie told me the story when I saw his faded picture on her fireplace mantle asked her who the kid was.

“My boy.”

We come from a line of civil servants, butchers, librarians, shopkeepers and farmers who become liberators.

Uncle Ken died fighting to liberate Europe.

His father, grandpa Dick, fought to liberate Europe twenty years earlier. He was gassed and shot in the legs for his troubles.

Our great grandfather, Liam, an abolitionist, died a Union officer fighting to liberate our nation from the madness of slavery. Two men in the unit he commanded won Medals of Honor in the battle that took his life.

Liam’s grandfather, William, a farmer in the colony of Virginia, served in his future state’s 4th Regiment under General George Washington. A hunter and a good shot he enlisted and fought to liberate Brandywine, Provincetown and, at Valley Forge, Trenton and Princeton, from the King’s redcoats. Pop inherited Private William Featherstone’s ancient pension application submitted long after the British caved at Yorktown and the Constitution was ratified and President Washington announced he wouldn’t run for re-election and President Adams, the Federalist, had handed the Presidency over to Thomas Jefferson. The War had cost William the life of his son, Andrew. Young Andrew followed his father into war and served as a drummer boy until he became another child lost to war. The war also cost William his 10-acre farm which fell into ruin during his absence.

Congress never paid the great revolutionary what he was owed. William died at ninety-one. He’s buried in a pauper’s cemetery in Missouri. His boy was buried near the battlefield where he fell.

We heard stories like that everytime dad took us to Arlington. The Master Sergeant had served in WWII and Korea and wanted us to know “the price”.

“This one here.”

We stopped.

“Feldman. Ben Feldman. We were in France, God knows where, running across a field into German fire when we came upon a civilian kid laying face down…he’d taken random fire— God knows what he was doing there, some farm kid in the wrong place at the wrong time— and we’re taking gunfire and I told Feldman we can’t stop to help the kid. Feldman said he thought he saw the kid breathing. I said we were sitting ducks. He said we had to stop to help and well, we stopped.”

Pop took a deep breath. “And here he is.”

We read the grave marker. Private Ben Feldman. August 9th. 1925-1944. “Eighteen.

Sniper I’m guessing. When I dropped and crawled over to him to feel his pulse I saw the kid had been dead a while. Bullets were flying out of nowhere. I hightailed it out of there and left them both there.”

The Master Sergeant placed a pebble on the white headstone, snapped to attention as best an old man could and saluted his friend. When my brother and I got home we told mom we saw the old man’s chin tremble.

We were all eating Swanson’s TV Dinners off our folding TV trays in the livingroom watching “Bewitched” when Bill reassured us he’d come back home to us, from Vietnam, alive. A few months later I got a letter from Bill telling me, “Don’t worry about me. I’m never on point. Medics are at the back of the line, ready to do what we got to do.”

I had a P.O.W. bracelet and a map on my bedroom wall with pins stuck in places with names like Da Nang. Hue. Pleiku. Cam Ranh Bay. Nha trang. I loved getting Bill’s typed parchment letters with their official looking mastheads. More fun than getting X-Rya specs or Sea Monkeys in your mailbox after waiting for what seemed like forever. The military postmarks and the stationery were cool. I showed the letters to all my friends. Shared them with my high school history class. At recess one jerk said Bill was a baby killer. I cursed him to his face. I ended up suspended for three days.

After he joined the service I saw Bill every couple of months which was not often enough. As soon as he pulled up in front of the house I’d run out to greet him. After our initial flying hug he’d judo throw me onto the ground and call me a mama’s boy and an obnoxious puke and he was so cool and I loved him so much.

He always brought slides of the places he’d seen. And Bill had seen the world. “There’s a world out there, Deanie the Weenie, and it’s on the other side of those mountains.” He’d been stationed in Germany and Japan and Korea and the south and he sent me candy from Germany and a Rolex he got in Saigon for next to nothing or so he said.

A lifetime later, at the Master Sergeant’s funeral, I watched dad’s honor guard fold his flag into a crisp triangle and hand it to my brother Bill. “On behalf of the President of the United States and the United States Air Force and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

Bill studied the fabric keepsake in his hands, running his fingers across the red and white stripes and patting the stars in their field of blue. He looked the young earnest soldier in the eyes and thanked her.

I leaned over and told Bill when he dies I want his flag. He laughed. “Let’s go to your place. I need a shot of Tequila.”

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.

-A. Lincoln

On my back porch, after Bill and I exhausted the topic of growing up under a Master Sergeant, Bill did something he never did. He talked about Vietnam. After nearly half a century of complete silence on the subject the stories poured out of my brother. Stories I’d never heard.

Remind me of my friend Dave. Years ago I was watching a war documentary on TV with Dave, an old retired “Peace and Love” stoner with a silver ponytail. The documentary was about the second World War and the bombing of the oil fields in eastern Europe by the Allies and halfway into the tale Dave nudged me and said, “I was a ball-turret gunner on one of those. That’s a B-26. I was shot down twice. Over Italy and Yugoslavia.”

“You’re making this up.”

“I wish. I was a P.O.W. Crash landed in a swamp. I saw freinds die. We were caught by partisans who traded us to the Germans.”

“What?”

“Russians liberated our camp. They had prostitutes and cattle with them. I hadn’t eaten meat in I don’t know how long. When I got home my mom hugged me and then slapped me and told me to never get shot down again.”

I had known this man next to me for decades and I never heard him ever tell anyone about ever flying any bombing missions on the underbellies of any flying deathtraps in a ball turret with his butt exposed to German guns with a huge machine gun between his legs.

As long as I knew him he had always been a Special Ed teacher who loved Buddha and his Spaniel. “You never told me any of this!”

”Flying back from a mission I saw a German courier on a motorbike and I strafed him. I killed him and I saw his face. He was a young kid. My age. Just a kid.”

What could I say?

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

-President A. Lincoln

Dave collected stories and pocket money from every country he passed through , “on my way to killing Hitler.” He glued the Libyan, Moroccan, Egyptian, Italian, French, German paper dollars end to end and made them into a roll he called a snorter.

Today that roll is a treasured keepsake in my top bureau drawer next to my dad’s medals thanking him for showing up at the recruiter’s office. After the old hippy died his widow gave me his snorter along with his favorite chain necklace from which hung a brass peace symbol with a cross welded on it.

I was wearing it when I asked Bill the question that haunted me the whole time he was a million miles away from me on the other side of the world. “Were you ever scared?”

“From the time I stepped off the troop transport until about a year later when I stepped back on it. Never took my hand off my .45. Ever.”

“Damn. You were so gung ho.”

“Shit. I was opposed the war. I was punished for giving medical aid to civilians. Can you believe that shit? They shipped me up to the DMZ.”

“Jesus. That is so…”

“There I was. River was on one side, jungle on our left. And it was pouring rain. Buckets, man. Suddenly we’re ambushed. The VC are shooting at us along the line, taking out our officers, our command structure’s gone and I can hear them yelling, ”We kill you all. We kill you all!” I hit the mud and a wounded grunt crawls to me, under fire, holding his ripped open belly. I reached in, found his artery, clamped it and dragged him by his collar through the mud, back up the trail, under fire, to an open field where a copter that had been called in along with air support was waiting for us.

Every other surviving straggler was crawling with us in the mud that stank of piss and blood firing into the gun barrel flashes in the jungle behind them and dragging their wounded buddies. Totally FUBAR.

We dragged him into the stretcher basket and they hauled him up into the hovering copter and by then the VC were taunting us and picking us off and then it was my turn to grab the rope and as I was being hauled up I lost my grip and fell straight down into the middle of the open circle and dislocated my right leg. Just then Tommy shows up and we went through medic training together and he’s returning fire with a dead man’s M-16 into the brush and I yelled at Tommy to step on my balls and pull my leg hard, back into place. Tommy yanks my leg and it hurts like a mother and Tommy helps me to the rope and I hang on and they pull me up and I made it back to post and that’s my story. Didn’t even notice I’d been shot in the arm. Hell of a scar. Look at that damn thing.” He rolled up his sleeve and we looked at the damned thing. “Just look at that.” Drunk on Tequila I said, ”Yep. Look at that thing.” I raised my shot glass. “Here’s to your arm.”

Clink.

After Bill downed the shot he sighed and said, “And here I am today safe and sound, an old man with gray hair, a roof and three squares a day.”

Men of your son's utter dedication to country and cause are rare. The loss of such a man is humanity's loss.

-President L. Johnson

We sat in silence for the longest time. I thought of the letters we sent back and forth across the ocean. The stories we shared and the stories we kept to ourselves. And soldiers calling out for their mothers.

“God. I am so sorry, man. You never told any of us about this.”

“That’s not the kind of thing you write home to your kid brother about.”

I poured another round. “Tell me about Tommy.”

“We went through medic training together. I was going through some bad shit. We were in country. I’d lost my helmet and I was hating everything about the war and I was sick of the madness, day after insane day, and I don’t know what I was thinking but I took my .45 and pointed it at my temple as we marched to the next village and as luck would have it Tommy was behind me. He was a black kid. He hated the war more than I did. For different reasons, right?

‘It’s racism, bro’, plain and simple. Screw that brotherhood shit. Why should I fight for a country that doesn’t respect me, man.’ I told Tommy I got it but we were in this world of shit together and we need each other. “It’s just us out here.”

And here we were, the very next day, out on patrol and me with my gun to my own head with the safety off about to end it all when Tommy grabs the gun and knocks me on my ass. Spun me around and cold cocked me. When I came to— guess what he says to me with a big shit-eating grin on his face?”

“What?”

“We’re in this world of shit together. And we need you, man.”

I asked Bill whatever happened to Tommy.

“Soon as I was safe in the copter I looked down and there he was on the ground. Gone. That man saved my life.“

Bill told me Tommy’s widow lives in Tacoma. She never remarried. Eighty and still working as a WalMart greeter. She sends Bill a beautiful card every year. Even after all the years. And all the wars.

Every Memorial Day.