At the Peachtree City Memorial Day ceremony on Monday, Mike King did a nice job of focusing attention on a few of our own who died far too young serving the rest of us.
For families who have felt the personal pain of that loss, I want to tell you something. It won’t bring back your son, husband or brother, but it might help just a little to know how those who were there with them in combat think of them, and remember them. Many of us think of them nearly every day, as if we’re keeping an unspoken pledge to each other – I will remember you.
I never knew anyone who gave his life. I do know some who lost their life doing their duty, doing America’s dirty work in unpleasant places. Not a single one of them died willingly. They just wanted to get their job done and go home to live out their lives like you and me.
I was one of the lucky ones. I had plenty of time in hospitals to contemplate my close call. When I was shot down in Vietnam and John Synowsky and Graham Stevens risked their necks to rescue me, my prospects were grim. When they visited me in the hospital and I thanked them, they brushed it off and said any of the other guys would have done the same thing. They were right because that’s how we were, struggling mightily to keep one another alive.
But even then, I had no idea how combat changes everyone, and knew nothing of the unexplainable things that would bubble inside me as the years passed. I used to think it was just me.
Between 2005 and 2010 while I was working on a book about Vietnam veterans, I spoke to a great many of them, and to veterans of WWII, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. Listening carefully helped me see more clearly how all of us were changed by war. It helped me understand myself a little more and clarify some things that are very hard to put into words.
Bear with me while I try.
How does the military prepare the raw material of 18-year olds for combat or a support role? Intense training and drilling helps a lot because every one of them is worried about measuring up, wondering if they are made of the right stuff, and knowing a routine helps.
When the time comes and the shooting starts, new guys are too busy doing their job to notice they are learning lessons that are not taught any other place. They thought they would be fighting for our flag, but it turned out they were fighting for each other. They thought courage was not being afraid, but they found out courage is doing your job while you are scared to death.
Combat is a cruel teacher, but like a hot forge blending men together instead of the ingredients of steel, somehow it turns a group of men into a sort of family where you may not like or even know a guy but you’ll take breathtaking risks to protect each other.
Amidst the chaos and urgency and danger of combat, beyond the mission there is powerful motivation that can be summed up in two words – honor and trust.
You might wonder what a 19-year-old soldier in combat knows about honor. Quite a bit, I think. He may not ever put it into words, but he knows honor is doing his job well and serving a purpose more important than himself, defending his brothers even at the risk of his life. He knows while looking in the mirror to shave in the morning whether he met the challenge. Passing that test becomes what he likes most about himself.
As he gets good at his job, at some point he suddenly realizes his brothers trust him to deliver, even under fire. He may never say it out loud, but he is enormously proud of earning that trust, and he would do anything not to lose it.
It’s almost like we proudly wore an invisible jacket of honor and trust that we had to earn, a high achievement that our family at home would never know about or understand. The complete trust we had in each other made a closeness that only Shakespeare has successfully described as he wrote King Henry V’s inspiring speech to his men before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The bonds formed in battle are not new.
And so, even though everyone in combat fears dying, we feared even more that our courage might fail us, that we might screw up, fail to do our job, and we might lose our brothers’ trust or even lose their lives. We feared that more than anything.
If you asked us back then if we loved each other, we would have thought you were out of your mind. But when one of us was killed, the cut ran very deep, and we crammed our anguish way down inside us into our own secret box and we closed the lid tight so we could carry on to do our job … and the ghosts of our dead brothers were never far away.
My roommate Pete was also a Cobra helicopter gunship pilot. On Dec 18, 1969, Pete was on top of the world when he received a telegram announcing the birth of his first child, a son; he wanted more than anything to be a dad.
Four days later he was on a mission helping the 3rd Mobile Strike Force, U.S. Special Forces, stop an enemy force invading South Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Pete was in the front seat when his aircraft went into the high, thick jungle trees after tangling with an enemy anti-aircraft gun and died as it stuck about 200 feet up and burned.
While protesters were hurling insults, as well as packets of urine and feces, at our troops coming home from that war every day at California airports, Pete’s family got word of his death on Christmas Eve. Pete is just one of those buried in my own secret box deep in my gut, and the memories never fade.
No matter what war it was, the calendar days passed, some days boring, some days exciting and some dark with anguish, and we all fantasized about going home, getting away from the nastiness of war and back to those we loved.
We may have left home as boys but we would return home serious men who had learned to quickly separate the fluff from important things that might get our brothers killed or keep them alive.
When we finally arrived home the reunion might not have been as smooth as we expected since we had changed more than we realized. We may have seemed remote to some people since our dead brothers, tucked away out of sight in our secret box, meant far more to us than the dumb-asses we met who would never sacrifice a thing for their country and wouldn’t know honor if it bit them on the backside.
It didn’t seem right that life went on as if there was no war, as if Americans were not still fighting and dying, and we found ourselves missing our brothers, both dead and alive, the people we respected now, the people who understood us now, the people we trusted completely now to watch our back.
How crazy is it that many of us secretly wished to be back where all but the new guys understood our most prized possession was our invisible jacket of honor and trust? Maybe we hated the war but felt the urge to be there again with the ones we were part of now.
We were cautious about opening our secret box to tell others about our dead brothers because the memories are wrapped in the same feelings we had when they died, just as fresh as yesterday, and we didn’t like losing our composure.
That is part of the power of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The names etched on the polished black granite wall make it personal. As family members and brothers in arms approach The Wall, the air becomes electric as memories wrapped in anguish fly out of secret boxes, finally set loose to run free.
We can almost see our dead brothers in the reflection of that polished wall, proudly wearing their jacket of honor and trust.
The Wall in Washington is our place to ease the pressure, to let loose those feelings we suppressed for so long, where we can talk to our dead brothers to tell them they are not forgotten, that we are teaching our children and grandchildren about them.
It’s a place where we can confess a tinge of guilt that we lived through it and they did not, that we got to live out our life and grow old while their faces are frozen forever young. The Wall is our place, where we can go together with our brothers and sisters who lived, a bit like church, a place of healing.
This is the reason America should build memorials for Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to glorify the war, but to provide the men and women of those wars a place of their own to gather and grieve and cleanse their soul. We should build those memorials.
I think all these things I am telling you are part of why veterans are drawn to each other. It’s more than remembering the past and swapping old worn-out tales. It’s the comfort of being with men and women who proved themselves worthy of honor and trust, people who did hard things well when they were young, people who understand when we say we can almost see the ghosts of our dead brothers among us, laughing and joking, sipping with us when we drink a toast to them and say our prayers in silence for them, the ones we miss, the ones we remember.
They died too young while doing America’s hardest work, and we know for every one of them there is a family of broken hearts. We can’t bring them back, but they do live on in our memory, for many of us until our last day alive.
[Terry Garlock occasionally contributes a column to The Citizen. His email is terry@garlock1.com.]
