Memorial Day

The following is an extract from an old post on this blog (back in 2006). I'm putting it in here because

(a) I'm too lazy to write another; and,

(b) it says what I want to say.

We (the vets) did what we did, which was, frankly, what we were told to do. Well, that combined with staying alive and keeping our buddies alive, but in the end it was just a job that needed done, and some of us got picked to do it. We could just as well have been told (and were) to patch runways or file paperwork, or spend our days drinking beer and waiting for our DEROS clock to wind down. (Side note: I just noticed that I still remember the exact moment I realized I had less than 10 days and a wake-up in-country before shipping back to the land of the Big PX, and had thereby become a "two-digit-midget," and more-or-less immune to field assignments.)

Speaking personally, and not taking a single iota from those who had a different experience, nothing much happened to me that was mythic, or heroic, or inspirational, or particularly edifying. It was a job, and like most jobs, some of it sucked, some of it was exciting, but mostly it was boring. Once in awhile it would make you shit yourself, which made for an adrenaline dump that would cycle you back and forth between "sucks" and "exciting" like being hooked up to a 120 line, and with many of the same end results (e.g., heart failure and the feeling that you've just been thoroughly beaten by 50 experts with baseball bats.)

So was I thinking of flag and country? John Wayne? Iwo Jima? George Washington crossing the Delaware? All the freedom and liberty I was protecting?

Naw. Sounds good on paper, but the truth is that every single day all I thought of, all I really cared about, was the only REAL hero I knew, the one who didn't sign up for any of this and who spent a year under pressures that I'll NEVER understand or fully appreciate and did it BY HERSELF, without support units or armor or artillery or squadrons or garrisons of troops.

Press "Play" (the "►" button) below, and read all about it:

Assuming you've got plugins enabled, and my bandwidth hasn't been eaten up, and the technological gods are smiling today, you're presently listening to "Hello, Vietnam". (Oh, stop whining...turn it off if you don't like it. I'll have to disable autoplay on it anyhow when I put up another post, and you'll actually have to punch the "play" button on it to make it work..that'll show ya...)

Wayne pointed the way to a large wad of Vietnam Era music on his blog, and this was one of the selections (no he doesn't give them away...I had to get it elsewhere).

This song, as always, clotted me up and got me snotting and blubbering and whatnot. In fact, my low tolerance for this particular song is the reason that it took several tries before I could watch the first 10 minutes or so of "Full Metal Jacket". How bizarro is that? Apparently deep memory gets triggered by odd stuff.

No, I wasn't getting shot at or jungle-rotted or any such drama when I heard it. Actually, believe it or not, this was the song on the car radio 30-odd years ago as I was arriving at the airport to embark on my tour of the magical wonderworld of Southeast Asia on the American Plan. In short, this was the background music to my life as it was sliding out of control and about to fetch up in a jungle in some third-world shithole.

My wife was there to see me off; she drove me to the airport, in fact. This takes on more import when you understand she'd actually only been my wife for 10 days, as we'd gotten married while I was on leave.

On top of that, we'd just found out in the previous 48 hours that she was already carrying our first child (we'd suspected, but decided to get married before we got the test so neither would ever wonder whether the other had felt "trapped"; exciting times all around).

So, since neither of us were bright enough to punch the "off" button in this high tension moment as we're rolling up to the terminal, the song you're listening to was playing. Understand, my life often seems to be scripted from a really bad daytime soap; the only odd thing here was that this time it in fact actually had a freakin' soundtrack.

Good-bye, my darling, Hello Vietnam
A hill to take, a battle to be won;
Kiss me goodbye and write me while I'm gone
Good-bye, my sweetheart, Hello Vietnam.

No Hollywood hack would touch a scene so improbably maudlin. In the background the turbo-prop warming up on the runway (a VERY small local airport), my new teenaged bride, looking terribly, heartbreakingly young, decked out in a favorite dress she knew I liked, ripping my heart out, weeping even though she was biting her lip to near bleeding trying to put on a brave face, and clutching my arm so hard I had fingerprint bruises turning dark purple long after I was in-country.

I was being nonchalant. I had to be nonchalant, y'see, as I would otherwise have defaulted to my actual status as "wound up tighter than a two-day watch, pale as a ghost and shaking like a leaf". Never mind the high-intensity previous 10 days (if you want a honeymoon to remember, have it just before shipping out to a combat zone). SEA (Southeast Asia) was kind of a spooky tour back in the day. At that point our KIA (Killed In Action) rate was about 20 per day which, while vanishingly small compared to the numbers we had in theater, was plenty, thanks.

And this fucking song stuck with me stronger than a Coca-Cola advertising jingle for at least three months. It seemed to always be in the back of my mind, every time I was standing in a shitstorm, every letter I got, the one phone call we got to make to each other the day my son was born (no internet and email in those days....)

Yeah, we're still married. After a kick-off like that, followed up by a year holding our breath waiting to see the end of the story, the rest of our life together didn't really seem all that complicated. Well, that and the fact that we really DO like each other...

Of course, the upside to this song is it gives me an excuse to consume large quantities of Jack Daniels, and remember a time when I was still hard as a coffin nail and new and studly and 10 feet tall and bulletproof, and a pretty girl in a summer dress standing alone in an airport lobby would weep for me and wait forever, like an old-time movie.

Unrelated: I just read that about 9% of Americans have EVER served in the military. Can that be true? Everyone I know has. Most I've met have, everything from artillery to clerks to combat medics to dog handlers to grunts. Or, thinking about it, maybe not.

In Our Next Episode: Less copying! More original content!