For The Soldier Enthusiasm For Combat Ends With The First Sounds Of Bullets Flying Past

[pinboy3niner]

12. I remember...

I remember...my son coming home from the Fourth Grade and me watching as he took my Purple Heart out of his bookbag. The medal had been packed away for years in my old footlocker in the attic, just as I'd packed away my war memories.

What are you doing with my Purple Heart?" I asked.

"We had Show-and-Tell today, Dad, so I took it to show the kids," my son replied. "I couldn't remember if it was WWI or WWII or WWIII you were in, but I figured it was WWII, and that's what I told them."

I didn't want to burst my son's bubble, but I had to tell him. "No," I said, "it was the Vietnam War."

My son skipped out to play, and that was the end of that--or so I thought. Until my wife told me of the question our son had saved to ask her that night as she tucked him in bed. "Mom,' he'd asked, "was the Vietnam War a good war or a bad war?"

I really felt for my son then, because he'd obviously heard negative things about the war and its soldiers. And I knew that the question he really was struggling with was: "Is my Dad a good man or a bad man?"


I remember...sitting in a coffee shop years after the war, cradling my cup of coffee and feeling the tears suddenly coming to my eyes as I remembered what a comfort a canteen cup of coffee was out in the field, during the brief respite after humping all day when we made a perimeter and had chow before going out on ambush...


I remember...being at a party in Westwood, CA after the war and hearing the sound of a Laugh Box, and discovering tears pouring down my face and being so shocked and scared because I didn't know why.

It was only when I snuck into the bathroom to wash my face that it came back. Joe, on Christmas day on a jungle hill out toward the A Shau, getting a Christmas present from home with chocolate chip cookies, a bottle of whiskey...and a Laugh Box. Sitting around playing poker in a poncho hooch on Christmas, and every once in a while somebody hitting the button on the Laugh Box and all of us cracking up.

And, a month later, Joe going down with a sucking chest wound from machine gun fire and my men volunteering unanimously to rappel from choppers into the firefight to try to save Joe. They wouldn't let us do it because we'd lose too many that way, and it wouldn't have helped, anyway. Joe died either on the jungle penetrator as they winched him up to the Medevac chopper or on the floor of the chopper. I'll never forget those good, good men.


I remember...