Frank

He never talked much about his tours of duty spent in the rice paddies and jungles of Southeast Asia. He went there just out of high school, a green kid from rural South Georgia. He was used to hard times. He had grown up with a father who drank a bit too much and sometimes slapped him around, and a mother who was always trying too hard to make up for it. He was continually getting into trouble at school. The service would be the perfect place for him, he was told. So he enlisted. 

No matter what hardships that were encountered stateside, nothing had prepared him for this duty.  The land itself was a contrast.  It was beautiful, yet menacing; rich in culture but poor in material wealth. A nation of people that were at once in desperate need of defending, and vicious defenders, themselves. And around every turn, Death waited for you.  It haunted the tree lines and the base camps.  It filled body bags with brave souls who lost their battles too soon and would be returning home to brokenhearted families. They would be forever frozen in time as the heroes of an undeclared war.

He existed in appalling battlefield conditions. Heat, rain and mud were constant companions. He learned to have no others that he called friends, because “friends” left you easily there.  The heartache of losing them was a cost far too great to bear. He had acquaintances, but he became a loner, more so, than ever before.  A lonely ghost of himself, who followed orders and tried his best to stay alive. 

And stay alive he did, although he really didn’t know how.  Men fell in battles all around him, beside him, in front of him.  The Reaper stalked his prey, but no bullet carrying his name found its mark.  Even though no deadly wound assaulted him, a silent killer entered his body.  One that would travel with him, dormant, through many destinations, and would return home to rest for awhile before it reared its ugly head and wreaked havoc on his life.

A Seventh Calvary insignia hung on the wall of his office, along with a few pictures of fellow soldiers. When you asked him about these, his answers were always matter-of-fact.  “Just some guys I served with, “ he would say.  No details.  No war stories.  No feelings.  But, if you really knew the man, you knew that his feelings were buried like the friends he had lost there.  Feelings, still too raw, even after forty years, to discuss. 

Retirement was forced on him due to his health.  He packed his things, and retreated to his home and wife.  He began to contact some of his military family over the internet, and started to attend reunions. A group of ten or twelve acquaintances began to meet at “The Wall” in D.C. each year, and he found some solace in the camaraderie.  He found that he shared more than military service with these Veterans.  They shared some of the same symptoms, as well.  Each reunion was marked with increased severity of these symptoms.

Finally, he collapsed one day. He had been putting up signs as a community project for a service club that he recently joined.  The collapse was fatal.  His “traveling companion” that accompanied him from the jungles of Nam, had claimed him as surely as if it had been the bullets that tore through the bodies of fellow soldiers.  His exposure to the Rainbow Herbicides “in country” had demanded yet another victim. 

He was buried with military honors in a secluded section of the family cemetery wherein rested his father and mother. His wife was given the flag that had covered his wooden coffin. As the last bugle notes sounded on the airwaves of his rural resting place, this unsung Viet Nam hero was laid to rest. The war had claimed another casualty.


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