Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist
A friend tells me stories now and then, when the others have wandered off or aren’t paying much mind to us. I can usually tell when it’s going to happen, because I can see it in his eyes.
He told me about calling the first sergeant to his post and pointing out into the field:
“I said, ‘Hey, Top (a nickname for first sergeants — the top sergeants), check out that water buffalo.’ ”
Top asked him, in classic first sergeant’s fashion, why he had dragged him up there to see one of the water buffaloes that were a common sight in Vietnam.
“I told him, ‘Look at this one through the (field) glasses and tell me if you’ve ever seen one with six legs.’ ”
As Jimmy Hatlo used to say, That’s When The Fun Began.
Another time, he heard the mortar rounds coming in and took off running for the nearest bunker.
“There was an old sergeant inside that bunker,” he said, “and he told me, ‘Son, you’d better go back and get your weapon.’ That’s what I did, and when I picked it up, the front half of it was gone, and the rest of it was broken and twisted.
“A voice said, ‘Get down!’ and I dropped down between two stacks of helicopter blades. That’s when two rounds hit the bunker.
“After it was over, I looked inside what was left of the bunker. The old sergeant was gone, and there was no trace of him. It was like he’d never been there,” he said. “There truly are angels in this world, and we don’t always have to go looking for them. They come to us.”
The other night, he motioned silently for me to come and sit next to him.
“Tell me, my friend,” he whispered, “when do the tears dry up?
“The older I get,” he went on, “the more I think about Vietnam. I try to keep busy, keep my mind on other things, but then I run out of things to distract myself with.
“Usually when I’m going down the road (to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Martinsburg), is when it hits me. I start to think about Vietnam and the things that happened there and the people who didn’t come home.
“So tell me. Do the tears ever stop?”
I said that I don’t know if they ever do, then told him about my father.
Dad outlived my mother for nearly eight years, and there was never a day he didn’t miss her with every bit of the love that had grown during the nearly 60 years they were together and seemed to keep on growing, even after she was gone.
Once while she was still alive, but confined to her bed and a wheelchair by a stroke, he talked about how much he still missed his parents. My grandfather had been dead for close to 40 years, and my grandmother for almost 20, and he said, “It’s funny how hard it still hits me now and then, that they’re no longer here. I guess you just never get over it.”
After my mother died, there were times when I could look at Dad and see on his face a look that I came to recognize. While I knew what it was and why it was there, I didn’t really understand it. He had been taken somewhere even I couldn’t join him.
Now that they’re both gone, I sometimes find myself in the same place where Dad once went, and I know what he felt.
It’s a feeling of being lonely, but somehow not alone ... no, never alone.
I told my friend it’s impossible to describe this to someone who hasn’t experienced it himself, and that it comes upon me when I least expect it. I might be having a great time, laughing and gloriously happy, maybe even praying or singing in our church choir, but suddenly ... .
The tears might not be in my eyes, I said, but in my heart, where no one but me knows about them.
“That’s how it is, brother,” he said, nodding slowly.
I told him I’m also good at keeping my mind occupied ... but soon, I would be leaving him and the rest of our friends to get into my car and drive, alone with my thoughts, half an hour back to my home in Keyser.
That’s when all of the phantoms that had been gathering quietly and unknown to me during the day would start to emerge.
“I’m afraid that people are starting to forget about the Vietnam veterans,” my buddy said with a terrible sadness in his eyes. “They’re occupied now with the guys who are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they’re forgetting about us the same way they forgot about the Korean veterans.”
Recently, while on vacation, I met a Korean War veteran who’d served in a submarine.
I told him South Korea was still a free and prosperous country, thanks to what he and the others had done — and are continuing to do. South Vietnam was still free when America’s troops came home. They did their job, but America’s government abandoned the land and the people they’d defended with everything they had.
My friend who knew that a water buffalo doesn’t have six legs said he once met a Vietnamese woman who told him that America was now her home because of him and the others, and she thanked him. He said something like that happens now and then, and it makes a difference.
In my living room, I am surrounded by photos of my family and friends and a collection of things that have little material value, but which help me recall the people and events that have shaped my life and made it worth living.
That includes pictures of Jim Bosley and Craig Haines, my high school friends who went alive to Vietnam, but didn’t come home that way. Each morning when I leave my house, I look at them and give them a salute ... one of my ways of thanking them for having once watched my back.
Their images rest on a shelf near my print of Lee Teter’s iconic “Reflections,” which shows my friend Jim Williams with his hand pressed against the shining black wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. His graying head is bowed in grief, and he cannot see the ghostly faces and figures of the eternally young men in battle dress, and a nurse, who are looking back at him.
If I ever stop reminding you about people like those I’ve told you about today, you will know that in my case, at least, the tears have finally dried. But I don’t expect that will happen until the day I stand with all of those for whom I have wept, and they smile and tell me there is no more need for tears.
The last time I saw my buddy, he said he’d recently been to the cemetery to visit his mom’s grave, and someone had asked him why he was crying.
“I miss her,” he said, “and I was thinking about my friends who were killed in Vietnam. I miss them, too. If you can’t cry for another human being, you’re not human, yourself.”
Our tears are not necessarily bad things. They are a part of life and all that goes with it. We cry them, not because of our sadness, but because we have loved.
For some of us, every day is Memorial Day.
Welcome Home.
