Veterans Day, talking about the weather and a little guilt:

[lazyriver]

As the son of a Vietnam War Veteran, I make it a point to call my father in NJ each Veterans Day. We aren't close in the traditional sense and pretty rarely pick up the phone just to talk. He's not a very big talker and rarely opens up to anyone about anything. So I know how the conversation is likely to go: I call and tell him I hoped he enjoyed his day off. He takes every Veterans Day off whether he's granted it or not. In fact, I think he enjoys NOT getting the day off more than when his company grants it because he gets to thumb his nose at them a few more times before he retires in two years. He'll respond in his usual way by telling me it was nice not to sit in the horrible NJ traffic for one weekday, that he went to the cemetery and spruced up his father and father-in-laws graves(both WWII vets)and then spent the rest of the day "just puttering around". We'll talk about the weather, (Did it snow up there in Maine yet?"), my job, my wife, my youngest sister now in college, his perpetual project refinishing a 1968 Tornado (wooden catamaran) and end with the usual "See you at Thanksgiving".

In all the years I've made this phone call, we've never talked about Veterans Day or what it means to him or me. He doesn't talk about the war and I always figured it was because it was something he wanted to forget because it caused him so much pain. I've never thanked him for serving. I've never thanked him for making the choice to put his own life on hold and, in fact, to forever alter the path he would take in life by enlisting and seeking active duty. He joined the army right out of High School, setting aside plans to go to college to study engineering. He would have been the first person in my family to go to college but he had a younger brother who was a freshman in HS (and who was very bright). My father believed by joining the military and volunteering for active duty, he might just help keep his little brother from getting drafted. He was young and idealistic; very much a child of the 50's in that he still believed in the American dream as it used to exist. He believed it was his duty to defend that dream by serving his country in whichever way it asked. He listened to the Platters while his friends were into the Beatles. He admitted to me when I was a teenager that when he was my age, he was guilty of believing the "domino theory" and the ghost stories about communism marching across the face of the earth. Even though he says it now with shame in his voice for buying it, he felt then like he owed it to his family, friends and country to go do something to help preserve the American way of life.

So in the summer of 1967, one week after graduating HS, my father shipped out to basic training and less than a year later he was manning an M-60 out the side door of a helicopter in Vietnam. He volunteered to go and after his first tour volunteered for a second. I don't know everything that he experienced during his service as he only really talked about it one time when I was a young teenager. I do know he earned a stack of medals. He showed them to me all those many years ago and they included a Bronze Star and Silver Star among many others. I also know he lost a lot of buddies and saw unspeakable acts of violence and cruelty perpetrated by both sides. I know he befriended a local Vietnamese man, "a mountain tribesman" as he calls him who built a traditional wooden handmade crossbow for him as a thank you gift for something my father did for him. Apparently, he helped him and his family out in some important way (he has never said how) and this man was very grateful. It took about 80 hours of work with primitive tools to make one of these fully functional and highly decorated crossbows. I also know the Vietnamese man "went missing" sometime in 1968 and nobody saw him again. My father thinks he was conscripted into the South Vietnamese army since a lot of that was going on in the villages surrounding his base camp at the time. The alternative is too unpleasant for him to consider as there was a lot of other stuff going on in those villages at the time as well. The crossbow hangs on my wall today, a proud gift from a father to his son and it is among my most cherished possessions.

I also know from reading the letters my grandmother saved that my father wrote home...a lot, almost daily. The letters read like postcards home from a kid's vacation to Europe. There is incredible descriptive detail of the landscape, the people, their culture and food, how they built their houses and how they built boats, the local animals, the weather. There are some vague details about what he was doing but he did an incredible job keeping the letters full of pleasant details and devoid of the harsh realities. He wanted to keep the war away from his mother. He did not want her to worry and thought he could keep her shielded from what was really going on. She would write, "I saw on the news last night that there's lots of fighting at such and such with lots of casualties. Are you anywhere near that"? He always answered that he wasn't and all he did was fly patrols and supply missions every day - pretty boring stuff. I learned from my grandfather and also from my father just how much he understated his missions and how he was nearly killed on almost a weekly basis when they would have to extract soldiers from hot spots behind enemy lines. I learned he lost almost a dozen good friends in one day, in one minute really, as their choppers were shot out of the air all around his while flying a mission into Cambodia (even though they officially weren't). The Chinook he was flying in barely made it out having to do an emergency landing (crash landing) back at their camp. They hit so hard some guys got wounded; my father chipped two teeth.

From one of his old 1st Air Cavalry friends that spent a week staying with us when I was 15, I found out how, in late 1968, the "kidney infection" that got him shipped to a Tokyo hospital for four months and ultimately back home was brought on by a piece of bullet that ricocheted around the inside of his Chinook and caught him in the lower back. I wished when I had that one chance to look at his wooden box full of metals, that I had known to look for the Purple Heart. He didn't tell my grandmother he got wounded until he was home for three weeks and out of the woods from the infection. He never told anyone else in our family anything at all about it. She knew though just as she knew then that he wrote all those happy letters to make her feel better. After all, she was stateside when my grandfather was serving in WWII and she was no stranger to the horrors of war. She did her part for her son and played along though, writing about the weather and pretending not to be worried.

So for many reasons, I owe my dad more than the usual phone call this year. I need to thank him. I need to thank him for making a choice to do what he believed was right even though it could have meant his life. I need to thank him for giving up the life he might have led as an engineer or a professional man. He came back as sane as the sanest Vietnam Vets I've ever met but he was never able to realize his dream of college. He went through hell and came back wiser but way too cynical for the college experience. So instead this man went to work in a thankless job to earn money for a house for his new wife then started a family. He's worked at the same company for nearly forty years swinging wrenches as a diesel mechanic. They chip away at his union's benefits every year and don't give him any of the respect he deserves not only for serving his country but for living through the ordeal and living well enough to stay married for 37 years raising four successful children.

I owe him my deepest gratitude for being the man he was when he was young, the career he sacrificed along the way, his efforts to internalize all the pain so as not to worry those he loves most and perhaps even more importantly, I owe him thanks for being the stand up man he's been since coming back to the World in 1969. I've read about the horrors facing the troops coming home from today's war. I've learned how many have so many problems adjusting to their old lives, about the night terrors, the PTSD, the divorces, the substance abuse, the homelessness. Then I think about my father as a young man coming back with similar baggage. Somehow, for nearly four decades, he's never taken a drug or alcoholic drink, never showed a sign of mental disorder (except his Quixotic obsession with refurbishing obscure old wood boats),and has lived a damned normal life. For his strength and courage I owe him so much more than the usual talk about the weather.