EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 SURVIVORS

An old friend called me last week. Well over a half-century ago we had been college roommates for a spell. He dropped out of college because, as he put it, “Inertia overtook me.” He fell under the spell of an army recruiter named “Sergeant Goforth.” ( I am not making this up.) This super-salesman sold my friend on the idea of enlisting with a goal of becoming an officer and then a Green Beret.

He made it, and served a tour working with a group of Montagnards in Vietnam. He went through so much training that I had finished my tour there before he ever left the states. When he returned stateside, the Army told him they didn’t need captains that had finished their tour, but he had to fill out the remaining time of his commitment. That resulted in some sad stories for him and other detainees at Fort Hood. But he survived.

The reason for his call was to tell me that he had received a bad medical report with an estimated life expectancy of no more than two or three years. He is currently using oxygen as a medical assistance.

This from a former Green Beret?

That’s a hard pill to swallow. My first question was, “Agent Orange?”

No, years of extensive woodworking without using a mask.

Not service related? Not directly, but maybe. A military experience, particularly one that included a tour in a war zone, tends to make a survivor feel impervious to common, everyday dangers. And though the VA denies most claims, with good reason, those with Agent Orange hovering over them can’t shake the feeling that, at the least, it may serve as a catalyst. It is like an invisible demon, placed above one by a fickle fate to be called into action when we least expect it, a fitting tool for a country that never forgave those who served in that miserable little war.

At any rate, somewhere on the east coast of America, there is an elderly man sitting in public with an oxygen cylinder by his side. Young ones pass by, nudge each other, and manage to hold their giggles until he is out of hearing.

They couldn’t imagine. They just couldn’t imagine.

Don't get me started ...

It never seems to stop. Some days just make me sad. Rainy days make me think of sitting on a bunker with an M-16 on my lap, staring at the jungle during a steady downpour that has gone on for more than a week.

They make me think of the young Navy Corpsmen in a wrinkled, soiled uniform, but with a chest full of ribbons, sitting alone on a bench at the Da Nang airbase, waiting to go home but staring into space with vacant eyes, unable to talk, and I remember wondering how long it might be before the demons left him

They make me think of how we, I and the guys on the plane with me, thought we had survived it all when we first saw nothing but the South China Sea below us. How we did clap and cheer.

They make me think of maybe a fourth of my comrades on that plane who would be denied, because of the color of their skin, the basic dignities of life when they disembarked onto American soil, and how not a few of my brothers and sisters would be hated and harmed, even until today, because of the body nature provided them.

They make me think of the woman in the San Bernardino airport who shielded her young child from me when she saw the service ribbons on my uniform.

They make me think of the personnel manager at the telephone company office in my home town, where I had filled out an employment application just to pass the time, telling me that the telephone company didn’t need veterans. It needed smart young grads.

They make me think of the “liberal” woman at a party years later who, when a friend told her that I was Vietnam Veteran, looked me over and said, “You don’t seem crazy like the rest of them.”

They make me think of how many movies, even still, include the ubiquitous character of a dope-fiend sociopath stalking the innocent because of his military service in that long-ago war.

They make me think of how those of us who thought we had survived, now a half-century later, awake each morning knowing that we may be carrying a final liability foisted upon us back then by people who thought we could kill more of their enemies if jungle hiding places became defoliated. As our former colleagues die or become disabled, one by one, we think more and more about the idiocy of war.

They make me think of the draft-dodging sons-of-bitches who would send young men and women to war, then say that it’s not worth taxing the immeasurably rich to provide care for the poor and the poor in spirit, many of my comrades among them.

They make me think of the sorry bastards who mock those comrades in public.

Finally, they just make me think, and wonder, that’s all. It places a sadness in my heart for all those who served and then become forgotten. I’ll get over it, if the ancient seeds planted by evil men don’t get me first.

Morning Thoughts: November 22, 2017

Got word of another brother's dying last week. I didn’t know him that well.  He was a good friend of a good friend, a year younger than I. He was a strapping, handsome man as a youth. He joined up, became a Green Beret, and came home with a Bronze Star, hardly a sickly specimen.

I always wonder, when men like that die before they might have, if he might have also come home with a little Agent Orange working on them as well, slowly, cruelly, and inexorably.

The obit didn’t say. Maybe so. Maybe not. But it was one more potential cost of war that my generation still faces. I know some that do, or have.

Agent Orange was a herbicide and defoliant chemical used to clear foliage in Vietnam so our forces could bomb more efficiently whomever happened to be below. It was clear and came in orange containers, hence the name.

It proved a hard substance to contain, and some say that any U.S. serviceman who served in-country from 1961 to 1971 may have been exposed. I seem to have been one of the lucky ones, as they unloaded the poison at piers that I guarded. I have walked within spitting distance of pallets of it stacked beside rows of coffins waiting to be shipped home.

Maybe 2,000 GIs have been treated for its damage. Reports seldom mention the 4 million Vietnamese who were exposed or the 3 million that reportedly suffered from its use.

One may imagine that its manufacturers, including Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Diamond Shamrock, among others, made good profits from its use.

It seems that Americans, particularly some politicians such as my state’s junior senator, increasingly see gun use, other violence, and even war as the solution to all political, and many social, issues. It is a fairly easy sell, since I think I read this week that the VA estimates that only 7.3 percent of living Americans have served, or do serve, in the military. That includes the ones who wake up each morning of their lives fearing symptoms of an ancient and invisible enemy.

Only about 0.4 percent of us currently serve, and practically none with political influence. The profiteers and war hawks will win. Everyone else will lose, and more obituaries will feature lives that might have lasted much longer than they did.

And they say the Galilean called “The Peacemakers” blessed.