8	HOME FROM WAR

Sad Times

Oh, Vietnam. The memories, it’s been so long ago

The sounds of bullets, bombs, and the cry of the wounded

At night, when I sleep, the dreams and nightmares

It has been so long ago, twenty years or more, but the memories make it seem like yesterday

How can you forget the hot, smelly, and sticky jungle, and the many flying insects?

The mud after a monsoon?

The many friends you made, and so few coming back

When you sleep, the dreams, nightmares, and waking up in a cold sweat

Saying to yourself, it’s over now, but how can you forget the memories of Sad Times?

Charlie Nelson

 

Remembering Fred Kenney

I saw your name upon The Wall and I cried so many tears

It seems just like yesterday, but it’s been so many years

I saw so many faces of veterans with welting eyes

We never told you how we felt, or got to say our goodbyes

Your memory etched in our minds, you were so brave and bold

Stories of your young lives still need to be told

You were eager and full of life, and waiting to go home

I’m sorry for not getting to you while you were lying all alone

I’ve cried so many tears my friend, I cannot forget that awful day

I heard your cries and screams for help, but then you heard God say

You’re coming home to be with me, I’ll guide you through the light

Your life was gone, you had gone home and I cried through the night

My life has been filled with sorrow to remember how you died

But I know that you are in heaven and looking down with pride

When we meet again someday, I hope you will take my hand

For we will be Brothers again and together in the Promised Land.

Tom Conroy

After Fred Kenney’s funeral in Canoga Park, Barbara Kenney and her young son Freddie moved into a condo in nearby Woodland Hills. Only 21, having lost the love of her life, caring for a young son, and feeling terribly alone – Barbara was adrift. All of her friends were preparing for the beginning of their lives and marriages, and she was a war widow. Everything seemed so dark. Through it all, Barbara remained close with the Kenneys, who did what they could to help, but nothing seemed to make a difference. But then amid her grief and only a few months after Fred’s funeral, Barbara began to hear from Don Hill, a family friend of the Kenneys whom she had once dated in high school. Don made it clear that he never stopped caring for her, and let it be known that he wanted to marry her and to help care for her young son. Initially Barbara was unsure of what to think. It was all so sudden. But when Don returned from his own stint in the military, Barbara saw him at a welcome-home party where the two talked and later began to date. To Barbara it was almost like someone had thrown her a lifeline. She craved nothing more than normalcy and a loving family for Freddie, and Don was there – a good man, a man she had known for much of her life. She talked her decision over with the Kenneys. They knew and liked Don Hill, and fully supported Barbara’s desire to get married and to start her life over again.

A few months later the couple wed. Don Hill was a good father and worked hard on his relationship with young Freddie. Don did his best to understand Barbara’s grief; after all, Fred had been his friend too. The little family even kept a picture of Fred Kenney on the wall to keep his memory alive. When Freddie turned four years old, as soon as they thought he could process the information, Barbara and Don sat him down and told him about Fred – his real father. Freddie sat through the explanation as best he could as tears began to roll down his cheeks. It all left the boy with so many questions. Don wasn’t his real dad? His real dad had been in the army and was dead? It broke Barbara’s heart to see little Freddie so distraught and so confused. It was like having to deal with the pain of losing Fred all over again. Barbara and Don helped Freddie deal with his sorrow as best they could, and, over time, he seemed to come to peace with the pain. As the years passed and Barbara and Don had four other children of their own, Freddie learned to balance a fatherly love for Don Hill with a growing curiosity about his real father. In the process, Freddie came to know and become close to his Kenney relatives, and developed a fierce pride in both his father and his sacrifice.

Through it all, though, Don and Barbara began to grow apart. Perhaps it was simply due to the many strains that so often doom marriages. Perhaps, though, the end of the marriage was rooted in its beginnings. There was still love there, and both parents cared deeply for their children, but the couple divorced in 1986. Although Don did his part to provide support, Barbara was once again alone – and without a job – but this time with five children. The important thing in her life was caring for her “babies,” but to do that she had to go and find work. Within a few months, Barbara was lucky enough to find a position with a friend who worked for a title company, a job that she would hold for 22 years. Barbara worked hard to raise her children and kept up a thriving relationship with the Kenneys along the way. All the while, the picture of Fred Kenney, lovingly cared for, hung on Barbara’s wall. Both she and Freddie did what they could to honor his memory, including visits to decorate his gravesite, but something was always missing. Barbara had kept Fred’s letters home from Vietnam, but she knew that they didn’t tell the whole story. Both she and Freddie wanted to know more.

As Vivian Conroy stood there waiting for the airplane to touch down in January 1968, she could hardly contain her excitement. Her husband Tom was coming home from Vietnam. The couple had married just after Tom’s basic training at Fort Riley, and had spent some time living together in a cramped apartment there before he had shipped out for war. But now he was coming home for good and their life together could finally begin. There were the tearful hugs and the sentimental moments that define any homecoming, but Vivian quickly realized that the Tom who had come home was not the same man she had sent to Vietnam only 12 short months ago. He seemed more distant, smiled less, jumped almost uncontrollably at loud noises. It hurt all the more because there was nothing Vivian could do. She knew that she would never understand what he had been through, and Tom certainly didn’t want to talk about it. She had to hope that this somber, dark time in Tom’s life would pass – that his wounds would heal on their own.

Tom Conroy never could escape from the visions of Vietnam – especially the memory of picking up Fred Kenney’s body on the morning of July 11 and getting covered in his blood. Then there had been the protestors in the San Francisco airport and the ongoing controversy over the war that had somehow conspired to cheapen the loss of so many good friends. Tom had done his very best to put the war behind him, and, like so many veterans, thought he was doing a reasonable job of hiding his pain. But Vivian knew him too well and could sense his suffering. The couple had three children, and Tom worked hard to support his burgeoning family, first in a chicken rendering plant and then as a truck driver before settling down to work in construction in the Los Angeles area until his retirement in 1999. Along the way, Tom began to hear more and more about something called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but he knew one thing for sure: he didn’t have it. Finally, though, one of his co-workers, who was a fellow veteran, handed Tom a pamphlet on PTSD. Mainly in an effort to please his well-meaning friend, Tom leafed through the brochure and, to his great surprise, discovered that the symptoms he was reading described him perfectly. Nightmares, quickness to anger, hyper alertness, dislike of crowds, feelings of guilt; they were all there.

With Vivian’s full support, Tom Conroy went to the Veterans Administration (VA) to receive counseling, where he shared his experiences in Vietnam with another person for the first time. It had all been bottled up in him for decades, festering. The doctor encouraged Tom to confront his fears. To remember Vietnam was a good thing, not a bad thing. Slowly, tentatively, Tom Conroy began to explore the memories of his past, memories that conjured horrible images and brought such pain – it hurt, but he kept trying, kept moving forward. In his own process of coming to terms with his past, Tom Conroy got back in touch with some of the many Charlie Company veterans who lived in the Los Angeles area. He even began to write about his experiences. But something was still missing. He had to confront the image that was seared so vividly into his consciousness. He had to confront the memory of Fred Kenney.

The younger Fred Kenney was at his home in the Simi Valley one evening when the phone rang. A voice on the other end asked, “Is this Fred Kenney, the son of a Fred Kenney who served in the 9th Infantry Division and who died in Vietnam?” After a short pause, Fred answered that he was. The man identified himself as Tom Conroy and said that he had served with Fred’s father. They had been friends, and he had been with him the day he died. Conroy expressed an interest in meeting Fred, and his mother Barbara if she was still in the area, to talk about what had happened that day. Fred took Conroy’s contact information and said that his mother did indeed still live in the area and that he would talk to her about it. After Conroy hung up, Fred called his mother and told her of the conversation. Neither Fred nor Barbara was at all sure about what to do next. They both wanted so badly to know about Fred’s time in Vietnam and about his friends. But could they bear hearing the story of his loss? After several conversations, though, Barbara and Fred decided that they shouldn’t pass up this opportunity.

A few days later, Barbara and Fred Kenney met with Tom Conroy, Bill Reynolds, and Stan Cockerell. To the Charlie Company veterans it was like a moment frozen in time. Barbara still looked just as beautiful as she did in the pictures that Fred delighted in showing off, and in Freddie they saw the image of their long-lost friend. For Barbara and Fred, the meeting was a cathartic experience. These men had clearly loved Fred Kenney. They remembered him so fondly and spoke of him in a way that almost seemed to make him come to life again. There was a shared joy in the room, until the men began to talk about the events of July 11. The details brought everyone to tears – with some reliving old pain while the others absorbed it anew. During it all, Barbara noticed something. It seemed to be making Conroy, Reynolds, and Cockerell feel better to speak to her; like they were finally transferring a burden they had carried alone for so long – finally delivering a message from the past that had weighed on them so heavily. Although hearing of the manner of Fred’s death was difficult, the knowledge was tempered with a feeling of calm. Fred had died surrounded by friends; friends who cared so much about him that they still held his memory dear after so many years. While Barbara sat detached from the conversation going on around her as the three men spoke further with Fred, her memories strayed back to the day she had first met Fred Kenney. There he stood, young and so good-looking. It was love at first sight. They were supposed to have had such a good life together, but he had fallen in that rice paddy so far away in Vietnam. The love of her life was truly gone, and she would never find someone so thoroughly nice ever again.

Two days after his wounding in the fighting on May 15, 1967, Carl Cortright struggled to come to terms with the idea that, at age 21, he would never walk again. For the remainder of his two-week stay in Vietnam, the hospital staff were very encouraging, stopping by twice a day and asking him to wiggle his toes. Although his brain fired, nothing happened. Ever. At the first hospital Chaplain Windmiller had been there holding his hand and offering comfort. At the next hospital, another chaplain informed Cortright that his family had already received a telegram informing them that he had been wounded and suggested that Cortright pen a letter home. Cortright obliged, but hid the worst from his parents. He told them that he had been wounded, but was going to live and would soon be home. From Vietnam, Cortright was flown directly to California and taken to Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. The next morning, the door to Cortright’s hospital room opened and there stood his parents Aubrey and Dorothy. For a few moments they just stood there, unable to react, as the reality set in. They had known that Carl was badly wounded, but they had not expected to see him strapped into a Stryker frame – a narrow, rigid cot for use in paralysis cases.

Their son, their beloved son, was paralyzed. There was no chance that he would ever walk again. But he had been fine only such a short time ago. It was so difficult for them to take, but the family worked through the bad times and was constantly at Cortright’s side during his eight weeks at Letterman. Next Cortright made his way to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach, California, where he was housed in a ward with 50 other spinal injury patients. The very next morning a nurse came into his room with a wheelchair and told Carl to get out of bed. He was not sure whom the nurse was talking to. He had been in bed for ten weeks and was somehow sure he would be bedridden forever. But, no, that nurse was talking to him. At only 100 pounds, Cortright struggled even to sit up, and the nurse had to wrestle him into the wheelchair. But it felt so good. He was up. He was mobile. Regardless of his newfound mobility, though, Cortright was in critical danger of lapsing into a depression. There were so many hard questions. Would he ever drive his white Impala again? Could he ever have a job or would he just be a “cripple?” Would he ever have a date or get married? But as he looked around the Long Beach VA, Cortright discovered something. There were so many people there who were worse off than he was, quadriplegics who would never have use of their bodies from the neck down. At least he could sit up. At least he could use his arms. His epiphany came when he noticed who was cheering him on the most – a veteran completely paralyzed except for partial use of one arm. Damn it! If this guy who was so much worse off was so optimistic why was he sitting there so damn depressed? From that moment Carl Cortright swore never to feel sorry for himself again.

By 1968 Carl Cortright was out of the hospital, living with his parents, and trying to figure out a new direction for his life. The first thing he had to do was get mobile – he had to get a car to fit back into the able-bodied culture of California in the late 1960s. Nobody thought he could do it, but Cortright went down to a local dealership and bought a car with hand controls, and, after a few lessons with the unwieldy setup, was back going to drive-in movies, flirting with girls, and generally living life. In the simple act of driving, Carl Cortright felt liberated, whole. His newly mobile life was not without its difficulties, though. At the time there were no such things as handicapped parking places, and Cortright could not get his wheelchair into the narrow spaces between standard parking spots. Sometimes the parking situation meant that Cortright could not go where he wanted or needed; worse was that sometimes when he was lucky enough to find a parking spot he would return only to find that the parking spaces around his car had been taken, leaving him stranded until the owners of the vehicles returned to depart. And there was always the matter of his wheelchair itself. Initially Cortright’s father, Aubrey, accompanied him almost everywhere to fold and load the cumbersome wheelchair into the back seat and then unload it when Carl was ready. But having dad along was no way to be successful on the social scene. Cortright practiced nearly every day, wriggling from the chair into the driver’s seat and then folding the chair and loading it into the back with one arm. The process involved trial and error, and a few spills, but in short order Carl Cortright was back looking for girls without his father in tow.

For a few months after his return from Vietnam, Carl Cortright suffered from vivid nightmares; the Viet Cong were shooting at him in slow motion. The bullets were kicking up mud and searching him out, but no matter how fast he ran he didn’t make any headway. He usually woke up before any bullets struck home. But Cortright was determined not to let one month in Vietnam get the best of him. He was determined not to live a life of bitterness and what ifs. He was paralyzed and that was that. No use being bitter, he just had to keep on living as best he could. While getting used to his new life, Cortright was determined to take some time off – to get his bearings. He didn’t need a job; he was on government disability. He could take some time to make up his mind about his future. In 1970 Cortright bought a house in Oxnard, California, on a government grant. Then he and his parents set out to discover America. As the decade of the 1970s unfolded, the Cortrights became inveterate travelers, driving in an RV across the country to Maine, traveling the trans-Canada Highway, and generally seeing what the continent had to offer. By 1979, Cortright had met a woman and had fallen in love, and the couple wed in 1981.

Cortright spent much of the 1980s helping to raise his stepchild and as an on-again off-again college student, working on a degree in photography. After his graduation in the early 1990s, Cortright put his skills to work in the field of computer photo imaging and also developed an interest in working in stained glass. His life, interrupted by a divorce in 1989, was full, but Cortright always found time to go and visit with other veterans at the local VA. While the social workers at the VA were happy that Cortright had so much to keep him busy and seemed to be in no danger of slipping into depression, one social worker in particular kept bugging him. Every year veterans like him from the Los Angeles area competed in the National Veterans Wheelchair Games, and she thought that it would be a good idea if he trained and went with them. It became something of a running joke. Every year she would ask Cortright to come with them; every year he said he would think about it. In 1996, when the games were scheduled to be in Atlanta, Cortright finally gave in – after all he wasn’t doing much of anything else that week. What the hell?

The games in Atlanta were beyond anything Cortright could have imagined. With the event being used as something of a dry run for the upcoming Atlanta Olympics, the disabled veterans got the best of everything – fancy hotels, great food, and wonderful hospitality. Cortright competed in a few events, including bowling, air gun, and table tennis – but it was the company that had the greatest impact. The life of a wheelchair-bound veteran can become very lonely. Other than visits to the VA, Cortright had never before met someone else like himself. He was always the odd man out – the different one, alone in a crowd. But at the National Veterans Wheelchair Games, everyone else was like him. There were 500 veterans in wheelchairs! For a week, instead of being singular, Carl Cortright was part of the norm, the majority. There weren’t stares or questions left politely unasked by the able bodied. Everyone else understood what it was like to live in a wheelchair, what it was like to be so badly wounded in battle. Carl Cortright had found a home. The games became an increasingly important part of Cortright’s life, returning every year to rekindle bonds of camaraderie with those with whom he shared so much. But it was more than just friendship and bonding; Carl Cortright wanted to excel in the games. In 2008 his dreams became a reality when Cortright won the gold medal in trapshooting. Winning the gold, a symbol of his victory over the debilitating, life-long effects of a single Viet Cong bullet fired during a single battle during a single month in Vietnam, meant the world to Carl Cortright, especially surrounded as he was by a caring family of veterans who were striving to achieve their own victories over grievous wounds suffered in their own wars.

While others were celebrating and drinking, Willie McTear spent the flight home from Vietnam lost in thought. He tried again and again to remember the faces of his friends Ron Schworer and Forrest Ramos. Already it was getting harder to recall them vividly, which saddened the big man greatly. He didn’t want to forget his friends. He never wanted to forget. When he filed off the aircraft in San Francisco he finally smiled. There was a crowd there cheering, welcoming him – and the memory of his friends – home. It all came crashing down when McTear realized that those weren’t cheers. The crowd was booing and yelling things like “baby killer!” What the hell had he been doing in Vietnam? Who had he been doing it for? McTear boarded the flight home more confused and saddened than ever. After landing in New Orleans, McTear made his way back to his tiny hometown of Newellton, Louisiana, where his family treated him to a party and a good, down-home dinner. For the next few days, McTear’s parents did everything they could to make him feel at home. His mother, Mary, cooked all his favorite dishes, while his father once again tried to talk Willie into joining him in the family logging business. “Real men work with their hands and sweat, son.” His father, grandfather, and uncle even took him hunting, which had been one of his favorite pastimes. It was there that it struck Willie McTear. Nothing was the same. Hunting wasn’t fun anymore. He had hunted people. Somehow hunting animals didn’t measure up, didn’t seem right. Nothing seemed right. He couldn’t reclaim the past, and it was of no use to try. He had changed too much.

Realizing that he had to get away, to make some kind of change, Willie McTear returned to Las Vegas and the college studies that had been interrupted by Vietnam. After some struggles, McTear graduated from community college in 1972 and went to work as a corrections officer in a juvenile detention center. He had also fallen in love, gotten married, and had two children, a girl and a boy. There he was, Willie McTear, living the American dream. Middle class, nice house, growing family. He had it all. But all the while his life was spiraling out of control. Willie McTear had never shaken the pain of Vietnam; he had simply covered it up. Alcohol and drugs were his defensive mechanisms, but they also threatened to destroy his life and the lives of his wife and children. The signs of his deterioration were all around. He often drank until he blacked out, only to have his children wake him. His best friends were gangsters, dope dealers, who were far too comfortable in his home. He was spending all his money on booze and drugs. He was a disgrace to his family. His so-called friends were a danger to his family. He saw no way out.

In January 1985, Willie McTear simply left. He took off his tie, walked away from his job, bought a pistol, and went to live on the streets. He stalked the mean streets of Las Vegas, looking for handouts to score his next shot of booze or next way to get high. He generally lived in flop houses with other homeless veterans. It was a dirty, difficult, demeaning existence, but somehow McTear felt at home among the other homeless men. Routinely McTear would pass out on the streets for days at a time. When he awoke he would often just stagger to the nearest bar, where sometimes he was received well and sometimes violently. On two occasions he was nearly kicked to death outside of bars, and another time a drug dealer stabbed him in the face, narrowly missing his eye. While he was on the street, his wife applied for and was granted a divorce, all without his knowledge. He was too high, too lost, to care. Willie McTear was slowly committing suicide. After five years of violent, besotted street life, Willie McTear hit bottom. He passed out in the back of a “shooting gallery” high on dope and wracked with pneumonia. While McTear tossed and turned on a cot, the purveyor of the gallery noticed that he was about to die. Not wanting a corpse on his hands, he hauled McTear to the hospital and dumped him, where he was eventually picked up by the Las Vegas Police.

While serving time on an outstanding warrant, Willie McTear sobered up. After so long on booze and drugs, going cold turkey was excruciating, leaving McTear with the cold sweats and panic attacks of withdrawal. But as his sentence was nearing its end, Willie McTear looked at the world clearly for the first time in years. He had lost everything in his life. He wanted to stay sober, but what was he going to do? Perhaps it was fate. Soon after his release from jail, when he was at his most vulnerable, Willie McTear received a visit from Richard Vincent, with whom he had worked in the juvenile detention system. The two had always gotten along well, and Vincent had since moved to Orange County, California, where he oversaw several of the Care Unit hospitals on the west coast. Seeing his old friend in distress, Vincent offered McTear a job and a place to live in California. It didn’t take Willie McTear long to decide. He took Vincent up on his offer. It was the best decision that he had made in years. McTear stuck to Vincent like glue, learning everything he could about hospital administration while coming to terms with his own future. What he saw, and who he had been, pushed McTear toward a natural career path. In 1994 he enrolled in Saddleback College to study the treatment of chemical dependency and alcohol abuse. In every page of his studies he saw himself; he saw the desperate faces of the other veterans living on the streets of Las Vegas. Willie McTear had found his calling. In 1998 he graduated at the top of his class, and then went on to work in several hospitals throughout California caring for those with chemical or alcohol dependency.

McTear had his own dependencies in check, working through them in part through Alcoholics Anonymous. While the meetings and camaraderie of AA were central to his recovery, they had only been a conduit to something greater and more meaningful. In one of his first nights at AA, McTear heard another member’s testimony that it was God, not AA, who had reclaimed his life. In his memories McTear was transported back to a tiny church in Newellton, Louisiana. His parents were there, his grandparents – his whole extended family. All singing. All praising. He remembered that he had once been close to God. War, death, and drugs had pulled McTear away from faith. He had been “in the belly of the beast.” After the meeting, Willie McTear visited and joined a small church in Santa Ana, California. It wasn’t going to be like church back home. He wasn’t the same, but somehow he knew that God welcomed him no matter what.

Even alcohol free, with a meaningful job, and with a renewed life of faith Willie McTear wasn’t right. He kept waking up at night in a panic. The nightmares were so vivid – the jungle smells, the lifeless faces, the gripping horror. He could hardly stand it. He had friends, but he didn’t want to be around them. He had a life, but sometimes he couldn’t face it. Willie McTear knew that he wasn’t crazy, but he sure didn’t know what was wrong. He just felt so alone, so desperate. What if he went back to his old ways and lost everything he had fought so hard to gain? Nobody else was having these problems. Maybe it was him. Maybe he was losing it. Finally Willie McTear swallowed his pride and spoke of his problem with one of the doctors he worked with at the hospital. It didn’t take long for the doctor to reach his diagnosis. Willie McTear exhibited the classic signs of PTSD. As soon as he had returned from the war, Willie McTear had turned to alcohol and drugs to numb his pain; he had never dealt with Vietnam – the friends he had lost, the things he had done, and the national rejection he and his generation had received for their sacrifice. Now that the alcohol and drugs were gone, Willie McTear finally had to deal with Vietnam. The doctor patted Willie on the shoulder and told him that there were medications to help and therapy he could receive, but, most importantly, he was not alone.

On his doctor’s instructions, Willie McTear began to get VA counseling for PTSD, which involved intense group therapy sessions with other veterans. His PTSD didn’t go away; the doctors had warned him that that’s not the way it works. Treatment and counseling didn’t eradicate Vietnam from his memory – he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to forget Vietnam, because that would have meant forgetting the good along with the bad – and there had been so much good. Friendships, camaraderie, laughter; Vietnam had been one of the most meaningful times of Willie McTear’s life. He didn’t want to forget Ron Schworer and Forrest Ramos. Losing them had hurt so badly, but he wanted to cherish the memories of who they had once been. No, Willie McTear didn’t want to forget Vietnam, but treatment helped him to learn to live with Vietnam without it threatening to consume him. With newfound hope, Willie McTear worked out the remainder of his career and in 2004 retired back to Las Vegas. He did what he could to patch up his relationships with his children, relationships too long ignored while Willie McTear wandered alone in the wilderness. In retirement, Willie McTear found the first true peace and contentment that he had known since his childhood. With his savings, military pensions, and social security, McTear had enough to buy a small house and a nice car. He devoted much of his time to AA and PTSD groups in the area, and set out to find the homeless veterans who had once been his only companions. He knew their lives, and they trusted him. McTear took those who would go to the VA and to AA meetings. Others he knew to be more hard-core and less trusting. For those veterans, the ones more thoroughly lost, McTear bought another small house to provide them with what shelter he could. With the sun having finally risen on his life, Willie McTear was determined to walk as boldly in the light as he had once stridden through the darkness.

With all of the hustle and bustle that surrounded the holding of a military funeral, Narciso Ramos could almost get lost in the moment, surrounded as he was by friends and relatives, and shield himself from the reality of his loss. But after the cars drove away and the crowds dwindled, Narciso and his youngest son Jesse were left in the silence of their small house outside the Yakima Indian Reservation – alone with the sad truth that Forrest was never coming home. Jesse had idolized his older brother Forrest; he had even carefully tucked away Forrest’s favorite slacks and shirt. When Forrest came home he had planned to have them ready, so the two could go to one of the community dances in Yakima that Forrest liked so well. Forrest could dance and flirt with the girls just like the old days; the only difference would be that this time, for once, Jesse would be old enough to go with him. But now the slacks and shirt would go unworn, destined to remain lovingly folded and tucked away in Jesse’s closet for years. For the sake of his youngest son, who was so obviously shaken by Forrest’s loss, Narciso tried to put on a brave face. Narciso threw himself into his work, kept up his normal routine of being both a father and mother around the house, and generally tried to hide his sorrow.

Although young Jesse never let on, he knew full well that Narciso was stricken with grief. Smiles came far less often to Narciso Ramos; he seemed locked in a world of melancholy, and there were the moments of quiet sobbing when he didn’t think Jesse was watching. Narciso’s pain returned afresh not even a month later when the news hit Wapato that two of Forrest’s high school classmates had died in Vietnam. There was another round of military funerals, more folded flags, and more grief – a refrain that would become all too frequent as the war in Vietnam lingered. The greatest family shock, though, came in early 1969 when Narciso was absent-mindedly sorting through the mail only to find an all-too-familiar government envelope. Jesse Ramos’ draft notice. Nearly beside himself with fear and worry, Narciso was frantic. He couldn’t lose another son in Vietnam. He just couldn’t. Jesse, though, took the news calmly. Young men his age all over the country were burning draft cards or running away to Canada, but he was going to Vietnam. He looked his father in the eye, and with no small measure of pride, told him that he was going to war like his brother before him. He was going to avenge Forrest’s death.

Jesse Ramos served in Vietnam as part of the 101st Airborne Division, fighting in the jungles of the Central Highlands during the latter part of 1969 and early 1970. He returned home to a proud and relieved father – a father who had been denied the opportunity to welcome another of his sons home. Looking up at the wall, Jesse noticed that the picture of him in his uniform now hung beside that of Forrest amid the many family photos. For Jesse there had been no single moment of revenge, no soul-purging catharsis. His part in Vietnam was over. The war just kept going. But Forrest was still gone, and the void in his life was still there. In a world left more bleak, the members of the Ramos family went on about their lives, getting jobs, falling in love, raising families of their own. All the while, though, the family did its best to remember Forrest, to not allow his memory to dim. Every holiday, when the family gathered, they swapped stories about Forrest. Forrest boxing. Forrest laughing. Forrest alive. But every year the past receded just a bit further, and the memories dimmed just a bit more – until 2003, when Vincent Ramos, son of Forrest’s older brother Paul, was sitting at his computer one evening and stumbled across a website for the 9th Infantry Division. Wasn’t that Uncle Forrest’s unit? After entering the site, Vincent could hardly believe his eyes. There was a picture of Uncle Forrest and a note asking anyone who had known Forrest Ramos to contact webmaster Bill Reynolds. Vincent dialed the number and talked to Bill, who later talked with Paul, Jesse, and the other Ramos siblings. Charlie Company was going to have a reunion, and he invited them all to come – the boys of Charlie Company would love to meet them and tell them about Forrest, about their lives with him, and about how much he had meant to everyone.

After receiving news of Bill Geier’s death, his mother, Bernice, fell back on her religion to keep her strong through making the funeral arrangements and the rigors of the service itself. Yet, just to keep going – to get up, to put one foot in front of the other, to live out the day – was so difficult. Somehow Bernice Geier not only had to go on living but also had to console the other members of her family, to plan the funeral, to welcome well-meaning friends and relatives. Through it all, though, she knew that God stood by her, a comforting and comfortable presence, like that of a dear and trusted friend. As Bernice Geier sat at her son’s funeral, she looked at the solemn beauty that surrounded her. The stillness of the cemetery, the stock-still military honor guard, the throng of friends and relatives that had come from all around. It was so sweet; Bill’s old high school newspaper even ran a special edition in his honor.

While Bernice dealt with the loss with quiet grace, Bill’s father Jack wore his sadness for all to see. The pair had always been so close, inseparable, cheering from the bleachers at Wrigley Field, setting up the tents on the family camping trips, coaching little league together. For Jack, there would be no more Cubs games with Bill, no college graduation. His life with his son was over. Jack still loved his family fiercely, and in some ways held them closer than he ever had before, but there was a void in his life – a wound that would not heal. His pain was so great that the family realized it had to do something for him. It was Bernice who hit on the idea. They had promised Bill that they would buy a travel trailer for his return from Vietnam and go camping in Colorado – which Bill had agreed was a far sight better than their normal routine of camping in tents in Wisconsin. To honor Bill, the family would still do it. The Geiers went and picked out a 14-foot Shasta travel trailer and went on vacation in Colorado in 1968 on schedule – in homage to Bill. For a week the Geiers took in the beauty of the West, talked about Bill, and dealt with their collective loss. At the time of the writing of this book, that travel trailer is still in use by the Geier family, owned now by Bill Geier’s eldest nephew and his family who travel the byways of the West with a picture of Bill on board.

As Jimmie Salazar stood there, holding his son Richard for the first time on the porch of his parents’ house in January 1968, he felt a strange sense of peace wash over him. The war was over, and his life as a father and husband could finally begin. It didn’t take Aurora long, though, to realize that Jimmie had changed. He was not that happy-go-lucky boy that she had fallen in love with at age 14. There was something different, more dark, about the new Jimmie Salazar. The simplest part of the change was that Jimmie had become a heavy drinker, almost like he was using booze to cover something up. The family spoke of Vietnam, something Aurora realized that she would never understand, and everyone hoped that Jimmie would just need a little time to readjust to his new life after what he had seen in that faraway land. On the surface Jimmie seemed to be doing everything right. He rented a small house a few blocks away so that he and his new family could move out of his parents’ home. He served out the remainder of his enlistment at Fort Hood and then returned home to serve as a member of an engineering battalion in the army reserve and got a job working on hydraulic systems for the Lower Colorado River Authority. Jimmie Salazar worked hard to achieve the American dream for his family, but the nightmare of Vietnam just wouldn’t go away.

Try as he might, the drinking couldn’t keep the pain at bay. Most visibly to others, Jimmie sometimes hit the dirt at loud noises. More personal, though, were the cold sweats, the whispered voices of friends who had been killed, and the terrible nightmares. Sometimes Jimmie would wake up in the middle of the night screaming and punching – punching Aurora. When he came to, Jimmie was horrified. How could he be hitting his wife? He loved her. What the hell was he doing? Aurora didn’t know what to do. She was only 18, was raising a child, and the kind and happy boy she had fallen in love with was gone. The new Jimmie still cared for his family deeply with a love that almost ached with tenderness, but his life was tinged with a constant sadness, a new and volcanic temper, and ever-present alcohol. Sharing a bond of true affection, the Salazars were determined to work through their problems; Aurora spoke with the family priest, while Jimmie went to see a physician. Surely someone would understand their troubles, understand the darkness that threatened to engulf Jimmie’s life. But in the 1970s there were no answers. Both the priest and the doctor remarked that many Vietnam veterans seemed troubled, but neither could offer much advice other than telling the young couple to remain strong.

The Salazars were strong. They, like so many others of Jimmie’s generation, fought on alone – misunderstood in a country that seemed so desperate to forget both Vietnam and its veterans. The good moments that they had were great – welcoming two more children into the world and sharing times of happiness that blazed all the brighter due in part to their comparative rarity. Jimmie worked hard to make certain that his family wanted for nothing, even though his anger often got him into trouble at work. But the bad times were still there, and were too frequent. The constant alcohol-fueled friction finally became too much for Aurora to bear, and the couple divorced. Then something miraculous happened. During 11 months apart, Jimmie gave up the booze and gained more control over his life. The bad times of nightmares and pain were less frequent; the old Jimmie Salazar who had won Aurora’s heart was back. The couple remarried and lived in peace.

Vietnam never totally went away, but the Salazars were now its master, until the terrible day in 1992 when Jimmie suffered his first heart attack. The war and the strains of its aftermath had taken a devastating physical toll on Jimmie, who suffered further heart attacks in both 1994 and 1996. With his heart failing, Jimmie had to give up his job – and, without either work or alcohol to serve as buffers, Vietnam came back into his life full-force and unbidden. The nightmares, the anger – it was all there. But this time there was an added and all-pervasive feeling of hopelessness. Aurora felt helpless as she watched her husband slip away a second time; often he would just sit in his chair and stare at the walls for hours. At least this time there was a name for their problem and pain – Jimmie was diagnosed with PTSD. Although Jimmie had never seen any of his Charlie Company buddies since 1968, he had always been active in local veterans’ groups like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but after 1992 he became involved in a different kind of group, a PTSD support group.

Although he entered treatment with high hopes, Jimmie Salazar was sorely disappointed. Sure he and the other veterans discussed their problems and issues, sure the doctors cared – but nothing got better. He felt like the docs were using him as a guinea pig, all while not really knowing what they were doing. For her part Aurora Salazar felt completely and bitterly alone. The American people had finally admitted that veterans were having problems with Vietnam; that was wonderful, but nobody seemed to realize that it was the wives and children of those veterans who bore the brunt of an all-too-often silent sorrow. The families of troubled veterans were in a no-win situation; they tried to understand, only to learn that they would never understand. They desperately tried to help, only to learn that they couldn’t help. All too often they could only stand by and watch their husband and father slowly disintegrate before their very eyes. Both Jimmie and Aurora, though, were determined not to fall into the same pervasive sorrow that had once destroyed their marriage. This time they were going to win, but they would have to find their own way forward.

With more time on his hands than in the past, Jimmie Salazar did what he could to attack PTSD head on, including taking a trip with a veterans’ group in 1999 to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Perhaps seeing those names after more than 30 years – Geier, Ferro, Kenney, Peterson – would in some way help him. But as soon as the group arrived in D.C., Salazar began to feel that ominous and all-too-familiar tightening in his chest. When his friends asked what was wrong, Jimmie told them that he was fine. He didn’t want to ruin everyone’s trip to the wall. A few days later, Jimmie was at a veterans’ group meeting back home, ready to tell everyone about his experience at the wall, when the heart attack hit full out. He managed to drive the 5 miles home, weaving in and out of traffic. Shocked by how pale Jimmie looked, Aurora rushed him to the hospital where doctors made ready for an emergency quadruple bypass. As Jimmie lay there on the gurney being prepped for surgery, it all hit him. The only guys who could understand him, the only guys who could help him were those men who knew the true meaning of those names etched in the black granite of the wall. With tears rolling down his cheeks, and teetering on the brink of death, Jimmie Salazar apologized to his wife Aurora for what he had put her through over the years, and whispered, “I’m so sorry that I am going to die without seeing my brothers of Charlie Company ever again.”

Jimmie Salazar survived the surgery, only to be diagnosed with diabetes so severe that it resulted in neuropathy from the waist down, leaving him with badly deteriorating function in both of his legs. With mounting physical problems, in addition to his ongoing PTSD, Salazar went on 100 percent disability. Now almost a prisoner in his own house, Salazar knew what he wanted to do – what he needed to do: to find Charlie Company. He wasn’t quite sure where to start looking for his old friends, so the process was slow. However, in 2002 Salazar hit pay dirt. He located a website for the 9th Infantry Division – a site that, when opened, was chock full of pictures of his old friends. There they were, all so young, all so vibrant. There was Fort Riley; there was Dong Tam; there was Kenny Frakes and Tim Johnson; there was – everything. Somehow sure that it was too good to be true, Salazar fumbled for the telephone to call the number listed on the website. The “hello” came from a voice instantly recognizable even after 35 years – Bill Reynolds, Salazar’s old friend from 2nd Platoon. Reynolds couldn’t believe his ears. The boys from Charlie Company had been looking for Jimmie for years – how the hell was he doing? The impromptu chat went on for nearly an hour as memories of the endless mud of the Rung Sat, the steaming heat of the rice paddies, the sudden fear of stumbling across a Viet Cong sniper, and of lost friends all flooded past. Then Reynolds gave Salazar the best news of all. Charlie Company was having a reunion, and he ought to come. It didn’t take Salazar even a minute to decide. Heart attacks, diabetes, and neuropathy be damned. He was going to Las Vegas to see his brothers once again.

Upon his arrival back in the world Elijah Taylor had sprinted through the protesters in San Francisco without a second glance. The war, with all of its blood and mud, was over, and he was headed back to Dallas and his own life. Those long-haired people who seemed so angry could worry about Vietnam all they wanted; he had been there, done that, and it was time to move on. When he arrived home, there waiting for him were both a proud father and his old job in the post office. After a short leave, during which he ate as much as he could of the southern delicacies that he had so missed while eating C Rations in Vietnam, Taylor served out the remainder of his enlistment at Fort Hood. But none of that really mattered; he was ready to get back to the life and job that he had enjoyed before Vietnam, like slipping on an old, comfortable shoe. When his hitch was over, Taylor went back to work as a window clerk in the main Dallas branch of the post office. While everything was familiar, including his old car, Taylor slowly realized that he had changed. Where there had once been a happy-go-lucky youngster who enjoyed chasing girls and drinking, there was now a more sober and dedicated young man. He had grown up while he was gone. For Elijah Taylor, Vietnam was there, and important – but the war did not define him. There was bitterness, especially when Saigon fell in 1975. With South Vietnam gone, had the whole war been for nothing? And there were painful reminders. Every January, Taylor reminded himself that another year had passed and that Fred Kenney’s son had had another birthday without his father. Working in the post office, Taylor was surrounded by other veterans who understood and valued his wartime experience. They talked about it, joked about it, and overcame it. In Vietnam Elijah Taylor had been gung-ho. He was proud of his service; proud of what he and Charlie Company had accomplished, and, working in the Dallas post office, it was OK to be proud of Vietnam.

By the 1970s, Taylor had moved to a better position in a sub-station of the main Dallas post office, had bought a house, gotten married, and started a family. His wife, a beautiful young woman named Precious, was everything he could have hoped. She took great care of their three daughters, all of whom had Elijah wrapped around their little fingers. And, while she never pressed the subject, Precious tried to understand what Vietnam was and what it meant to her husband. The couple talked about the war, with Precious patiently listening to all of her husband’s many stories, and relegated Vietnam to a tiny, well-tended corner of their married lives. There were bigger things to worry about; the children were growing up, and it was time to get their eldest daughter, Kim, ready for college. But in August 1990, Kim gave them the news. She didn’t want to go to college just yet. She wanted to follow in daddy’s footsteps and go into the military. Initially Precious didn’t like the idea very much, but Elijah knew firsthand how the military could help a young person gain maturity, so he supported Kim’s plan. Elijah and Precious saw Kim off to basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, only to learn a few days later that Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait.

Elijah Taylor knew that his eldest daughter was likely off to war, especially when the family learned that she was not going to be granted leave after basic training but instead was slated to go straight to advanced individual training (AIT) for her specialist duties as a quartermaster. Proud, but somewhat apprehensive, Taylor wasn’t going to miss Kim’s graduation from basic for the world. Fort Jackson seemed so familiar to Taylor – the drill sergeants, the harried trainees. And Kim seemed so familiar, reminded him so much of himself. She was gung-ho, one of the top trainees in her battalion. Taylor’s heart beat just a bit faster, and he had to choke back a tear as she marched past with her unit. Was that how his own father had felt all those years ago in 1966? During AIT, Kim kept up a steady stream of letters home, and received some fatherly advice. Elijah warned Kim that he could take it – all the news that she had to send, the good and the bad. But Precious was already losing weight with the worry of sending a daughter to war. In letters home to her mother, Kim should only write about the good things, her surroundings, her friends, her hopes. There was a lot of praying going on in the Taylor home after Kim’s departure for Saudi Arabia. The family rushed to read Kim’s latest letters, all of which seemed so happy. The build-up for the war was really going well. This was going to be a cinch. With each new letter, Elijah Taylor suppressed a quiet chuckle; he had a smart daughter.

In January 1991, the bombing of Iraq began – build-up had become war. The prayers in the Taylor home became ever more fervent as the family gathered around the television to watch the war unfold before their eyes. When the ground war began in February, everything in the house came to a halt, but the war was going so well, surely everything would be fine. On February 25 the reports came in that an Iraqi missile had slammed into a quartermaster corps barracks in Dhahran. There were bodies everywhere. But Kim was in the quartermaster corps! It just couldn’t be. The Taylors hurried to gather what little information they could, but it was still hours before they learned that Kim was not at Dhahran, but in a station farther out in the desert. Elijah and Precious could hardly take it, and for a moment Elijah stopped short and hoped that his parents had not been as worried about him for his entire year in Vietnam.

Shortly after learning that Kim was safe, the war in Iraq came to an end. In May 1991, there she was, getting off her own freedom bird and coming back to the world. The Taylors met her flight at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the same airport to which Elijah had returned in such a hurry 24 years before. Taylor looked around and liked what he saw. There were no protestors. There were crowds, waving flags, clapping, hugging. Joyous crowds reveling in victory. Crowds welcoming the soldiers home from war. Elijah Taylor’s chest swelled with pride. But underneath it all was a faint tinge of jealousy. His soldiers, the brave men of Charlie Company, had never received a welcome home. There was no victory. They had been greeted with curses instead of applause. But seeing his daughter getting off that aircraft and hearing the cheers, it all seemed worth it. It seemed that America had learned from its mistakes. If America had learned never to treat its returning soldiers that way again, well, it was a price that Elijah Taylor was happy to have paid to see the look on Kim’s face as she ran toward them amid all the cathartic applause. Maybe it was his welcome home too.

As the children began to grow up and move out, and as he began to consider retirement, Elijah Taylor would sometimes wake at night with Precious shaking him by the shoulders. He had been thrashing around and yelling out in some kind of nightmare. He never could quite remember the dreams; the faces and events remained just beyond his waking grasp, but Taylor knew that they were about Vietnam. The memories didn’t distract him from his work, or derail his life – Vietnam was just more, well, there. More at the front of his consciousness rather than safely tucked away. Precious had heard about PTSD and asked Elijah to go and talk to a doctor before things got any worse. A doctor? A VA doctor? Elijah agreed to go, but he couldn’t shake the notion that VA doctors were for veterans dealing with serious injuries, like the loss of a limb. When he had his first meeting, Taylor was surprised to learn that many veterans first exhibited symptoms of PTSD when they got older and were dealing with a major life change like their children leaving home or retirement. Without those elements of life that normally keep adults so busy, work and children, memories of war are more able to percolate to the surface and take a place of greater importance. The doc assured him that it was OK; it was normal. Elijah Taylor went to his treatment meetings, and he and Precious made a determined effort that, while Vietnam was going to be a bigger part of his life, it would not be the biggest. The family moved forward, welcoming three granddaughters into the world. Elijah Taylor retired from his beloved job in the post office in 2004; shortly after he had received the heart-breaking news that Precious had cancer. With the help of Elijah and the entire family, Precious Taylor fought that disease tooth and nail, living long enough to know that her eldest daughter had given the Taylors their fourth grandchild – this time a grandson. It was a difficult time for Elijah Taylor, a time of mixed and powerful emotions. He had to say goodbye to his best friend, but he also had to welcome his grandson into the world. Elijah Taylor knew just what to do. After the funeral he went to the sporting goods store and bought a baseball glove. He knew it was going to be a while, but he just couldn’t wait for T-Ball to start.

Finally touching down in New Jersey, Gary Maibach went, along with the other soldiers returning from Vietnam, for out-processing at Fort Dix. After he and his compatriots had turned in their summer uniforms, and while they were standing there in their underwear, a group of some 200 new recruits – so new that they had not even received their inaugural military-regulation haircut – came traipsing from the opposite direction in their collective underwear. A few looks and mumbled greetings were exchanged between the two files of men, separated as they were by the vast gulf of experience. Maibach sympathized with the soldiers-to-be, and offered a silent prayer for them as he stepped back into his own civilian life. Gary’s father and wife, Mary, met him, and the group decided to stay the night in a hotel in Pennsylvania rather than hazard the long journey back to Sterling, Ohio, in the dark. When they opened the door to the hotel room, Maibach remarked that they might have to move to another room. This one smelled a bit funny. Mary sniffed the air, with something of a quizzical look on her face, and said that it smelled just fine to her. Then Maibach realized what it was. It was he that smelled. He smelled like Vietnam, like war. He had never noticed the smell while he had been there, but now that he was back home it was unmistakable. It seemed like it was going to take some time to get used to being home.

The smells of “civilization,” though, were the least of Gary Maibach’s concerns. He and Mary had only been husband and wife for a few months before he was drafted. She had accompanied him to Fort Riley, where, in November 1966, she had presented him with a daughter named Karen. Gary Maibach had always taken his duties as a husband and father very seriously, but, with all of the training and his looming departure for war, everything had been so rushed. When he returned to Sterling in 1968, Gary Maibach had to reacquaint himself with his young family. His daughter had not even been two months old when he had departed for Vietnam; now she was a happy toddler – not just a pretty face in a tattered snapshot, but a real little girl. To Karen, who had lived with her mother’s large family during Maibach’s absence, this new adult on the scene was just another face in a big crowd. Gary took her into his arms, and their life together began anew.

Gary Maibach went back to work in the family store, taking on roles of ever greater importance, and launched himself back into the religious life of his church. Through it all he had a wonderful support group. So many of his relatives had served in past wars, and with his church having such a strong tradition of providing its members to serve as corpsmen in the military, Maibach was surrounded by people who could understand what he had been through and people who held his service in very high regard. Still, it hurt to see mounting protest in the country. Gary Maibach, more than most, understood and valued individual conscience and the right to protest; but it saddened him greatly to see so much of the vitriol aimed at the soldiers themselves – young men like his brothers from Charlie Company who were only doing what their nation had asked them to do in the most difficult of circumstances. But Vietnam could not have a hold on his life – he was far too busy dealing with the present to become mired in the past. By the time Saigon fell, Gary Maibach was president of a rapidly expanding family business, while he and Mary were also busy raising four children – Karen, Mark, David, and James. His faith had also led him toward a new and challenging spiritual future – in 1971 Gary Maibach was chosen to be a minister of the Apostolic Christian Church of America.

There were five democratically chosen ministers in Maibach’s congregation, a rapidly growing flock that totaled nearly 700 worshippers each Sunday. The ministers divided the church’s work as evenly as they could – but with three weekly services, spiritual education, ministering to the ill and shut-ins, and counseling, there was more than enough work to go around – especially for a father of three who was also running his own business. More than anything else, it was Gary Maibach’s enduring faith, combined with his work in the spiritual vineyard of his church, that allowed him to transform the legacy of Charlie Company’s service in Vietnam into a tool for good. One piece of scripture kept returning to Maibach’s mind over and over again when he thought of Vietnam. Romans 8:28 – “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.”

Maibach realized that wars sometimes destroyed the souls of men; he had seen it happen all too frequently in Vietnam. It had left him feeling so helpless to see young men lost in a spiritual wilderness. These same young men, in their tens of thousands, had returned from war. Men with God-shaped holes in their lives. Men just like many of his brothers in Charlie Company. Maibach earnestly believed that it was only the peace of God, freely given, that would be able to mend these men, to make them spiritually and physically whole again. To Gary Maibach, Romans 8:28 called upon him to use his Vietnam experiences, as difficult as they were, to work for God’s good. Whether it was by preaching, counseling, or just living his life, Maibach hoped to reach out to other veterans – those who were still lost – and bring them home. The bad of Vietnam could become a good, a tool in the reclamation of others. Over the years, Maibach has slowly regained contact with many of his brothers from Charlie Company, and does what he can to help. Often, as it was in Vietnam, he only listens. Faith is not something you can push onto somebody, after all. When help is asked, he gives it freely. And every night, Gary Maibach prays for the boys of Charlie Company, especially for those who still cannot pray for themselves.

While recovering from the wounds to the neck and leg that he had suffered in the fighting on May 15, Charlie Nelson received a visit from his sister. She gave him news that the young Navajo already expected – his parents would not be coming to visit him in the hospital in San Francisco; it was just too far away. But they sent word that, as soon as he was well enough, Charlie needed to return to the reservation to undertake the age-old cleansing ritual of his people – a type of powerful medicine reserved for warriors. But Charlie had a stubborn streak; while his parents had given up on life in Los Angeles and had returned to herding sheep on the reservation, he wasn’t about to trade Hollywood for a hogan. After his release, Nelson hobbled to a friend’s house in LA – he was ready to be young again. For the next year and a half Nelson worked odd jobs, crashed on his buddy’s couch, and hit the local drinking scene with a vengeance. Through it all, the drinking became an ever more dominant part of his life. Spending what little money he made on booze, Nelson drank to go to sleep, drank to have fun, drank to wake up – drank almost constantly. But still Nelson needed more booze, because the drinking wasn’t doing its job. The constant nightmares and day-mares, the inability to sleep, the fear of crowds, the jumping at the slightest sound, the jitteriness, the numbness; no matter how much he drank it just didn’t work. The memories were still there.

Charlie’s parents had already seen Vietnam take a terrible toll on the reservation’s youth, and feared for their son’s life. Several of the reservation’s veterans who had returned from Vietnam had taken to drink, sliding into a tortured oblivion. One had gone out with his sheep one morning and had never returned. The next day a rescue party found him dead at the watering hole – he had shot himself in the head. Two others, cousins back from the war, committed suicide by walking together in front of a speeding semi-trailer. Realizing that his life was hopeless and in response to the pleading of his parents, Charlie Nelson returned to the reservation in 1969. Strong in support of their warriors, Navajo gathered from all around for Nelson’s cleansing ceremony – especially from the Salt Clan of his mother and the Big Water Clan of his father. The ritual – part celebration, part mourning – lasted for four days of dancing, feasting, and praying. At the center of events stood the ritual hogan, where Charlie Nelson sat with a single medicine man. With infinite care and elaborate ceremony, the medicine man had crafted two small, but powerful, balls of medicine. At the height of the ceremony, as the fire burned low and the smoke gathered, the medicine man instructed Nelson to eat the first ball of medicine. Nelson placed the ball in his mouth and began to chew, and promptly gagged on the bitter substance. As the crowd gasped, the medicine man leaned in and whispered to Charlie – in English. Charlie didn’t even know that the medicine man spoke English! He instructed Nelson to flatten the second ball against the roof of his mouth with his tongue before he swallowed it – it would taste better that way. Nelson looked at the medicine man, who seemed to be wearing just the slightest grin, and then followed his whispered advice. The second ball of medicine went down without a hitch, as the assembled crowd looked on approvingly.

For all of the powerful magic and the acceptance of his grateful people, Charlie Nelson still wandered, still couldn’t put Vietnam into the past. At first he departed the reservation for Phoenix, where he went to college on the GI Bill to become an elementary school teacher. But during his studies his father passed away unexpectedly, leaving the family without a patriarch. As the eldest son, it fell to Charlie to return to the reservation to care for his mother and the family flock and farm. At first it was a letdown – to go back to herding sheep, splitting firewood, and hauling 50-gallon drums of water for the crops. Charlie Nelson had wanted more, had seen more, and was now right back where he had started. Sure he was disappointed, but there was nothing for it. This was his future, so Charlie Nelson worked hard. His garden was the best for miles around, with friends constantly dropping by and asking for some of his squash or corn. The family flock prospered, and Nelson learned to do much of the work for himself – the shearing and the castrating – so he didn’t have to pay someone else. He became so skilled that his services were in constant demand from his neighbors. Charlie Nelson settled down into a simple life that followed the rhythm of the seasons.

Through it all, though, Vietnam remained. The nightmares continued, and, after his mother passed away, Nelson became a loner. He had given up the booze, because it simply wasn’t working. An accustomed sight, silently tending his herd and garden, Nelson didn’t need anybody. Didn’t need friends. Didn’t need a phone. Someone in the closely knit community, though, was keeping tabs on Charlie Nelson and contacted the Northern Arizona Veterans Affairs Hospital in Prescott, Arizona, on his behalf. The doctors brought Charlie in for a meeting where they talked about PTSD. Charlie was happy enough to talk – these docs seemed really to care about his experiences. He was happy enough to go to group meetings with other veterans. But Charlie Nelson was not happy to hear the docs’ advice that he ought to forget Vietnam. He didn’t want to forget – either the good times or the bad. Forgetting Vietnam would be forgetting himself. No. Charlie Nelson had another way to deal with PTSD, if that’s what you call it. The vast openness of the desert plains, surrounded by his flock, was Nelson’s cure. Under a canopy of stars, with only the soft bleating of his sheep to interrupt the deep stillness, Charlie Nelson was gloriously, singularly alone. In that pure solitude, he sat beside a single companion – Vietnam. In some ways his worst enemy, but in others his only friend.

After a short leave in Fayetteville, Arkansas, spent getting to know his wife Nancy again and trying to convince his young son Jack Junior that he really was his daddy, Jack Benedick returned with his family to Fort Riley, where he worked as part of the post operations section. Jack, Nancy, and Jack Junior settled down into a comfortable routine, and even wondered together what civilian life would be like after Benedick’s military career ended in May 1968. As his separation date neared and Jack and Nancy first began to think about where they might move and what they might do when he left the service, Benedick received a telegram from the parents of his best friend John Hoskins. From the time that they had first met in Fort Riley in the spring of 1966, the two young Charlie Company platoon leaders had formed an inseparable bond, Hoskins the warrior-poet graduate of West Point, Benedick the hardscrabble OCS graduate. John Hoskins, then a company commander serving his second tour in Vietnam, had died, killed by the detonation of a land mine he had been trying to disarm. It was while he was serving as one of Hoskins’ pallbearers on a dreary, gray afternoon at West Point that Benedick made his decision. He wasn’t going to leave the army. He was going to go back to Vietnam to get revenge for his fallen friend. There was no chance at all that he would catch Hoskins’ killers, but even an impersonal revenge was better than doing nothing at all. Nancy was not happy with her husband’s decision, but she had been expecting it. Even she couldn’t really see Jack Benedick as a civilian. He was a military man. It had been nice to dream about playing house together and having a normal life, but she had always known deep inside that he would return to Vietnam.

Following a period of refresher training, Jack Benedick got the news in the early spring of 1969; he was headed back to Vietnam to command Charlie Company, 3rd of the 60th Infantry – a familiar position since the unit was part of the 9th Infantry Division and operated in the Mekong Delta. But as soon as he arrived in country, Benedick realized that much had changed. The war in the delta was no longer much of a “shooting war.” Having suffered heavy losses during the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong was lying low. There were no more bitter clashes of sizeable units. It was now more than ever a land-mine and booby-trap war. That was fine by Jack Benedick. He had helped develop the 9th Infantry Division’s tactics for dealing with land mines. On April 30, 1969, after just a month in his new command, Benedick called his new Charlie Company to a halt. The unit had reached a sharp bend in the tree line it was patrolling – a perfect spot for an ambush or a minefield. Benedick motioned for his RTOs to follow and stepped out into the rice paddy to get a look at what was awaiting Charlie Company around that ominous bend. To get to a point where he could see the way forward clearly, Benedick had to break one of his own rules of delta warfare; he had to step up on a rice paddy dike. He had just barely gotten his trailing foot onto the dike when the world erupted into a massive explosion. A few seconds later, Benedick came crashing down out of the air into the murky rice paddy water. After checking his crotch to make sure that his “jewels” were intact, Benedick looked at his legs. One was gone below the knee, a jagged piece of bone protruding from a stump that was bleeding freely, and the other leg was mangled beyond recognition. Cursing wildly, Benedick got on the radio to order his own medevac helicopter. Both of his RTOs had been injured, and, though he allowed the medic to give him a morphine shot to ease the pain, Benedick demanded that the RTOs be choppered out first. He could wait.

Benedick left on the last helicopter, bound for surgery in the divisional hospital in the familiar confines of Dong Tam. The scene was something of a blur, with doctors and nurses hooking him up to IVs and discussing his shattered legs. Before they put him under, Benedick grabbed the lead surgeon by the throat, pulled him close, and said, “If you cut off my fucking knees I will kill you. I’m damned if I am going to sit around the rest of my life as a cripple!” With a look in his eyes that indicated he believed that Benedick would follow through on his threat, the surgeon promised Benedick that he would do his best. After surgery Benedick awoke to find a somewhat relieved surgeon waiting to give him the good news that, while he had lost both of his legs, the amputations had taken place below the knees. Benedick hurt like hell, and noticed that bone still protruded from the base of both of his stumps. The doctor told him that it was something about warding off infections – the stumps would have to remain open, perhaps for months. But none of that conversation really registered, because there was more bad news to follow. Wearing a very concerned look, the doctor informed Benedick that his kidneys had shut down, a condition that was not too rare given the circumstances, but one that could prove life-threatening. Ever the cantankerous patient, Benedick replied, “You say my kidneys have quit working? Well, damn it, you are the doc. Make ’em work!”

The next day Benedick was on a chopper bound for the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon, where they had a dialysis machine. Whether due to a mistake in paperwork or pilot error, though, Benedick arrived at the wrong hospital. As the staff tried to work out who he was and what kind of care he required a helpful nurse asked Benedick if he was hungry. Benedick replied that he was famished and would love a cheeseburger. A few minutes later Benedick sat enjoying his first meal in three days, only to be interrupted by a doctor who rushed in and yelled, “You have to stop! Why are you eating?” Not even bothering to take time to swallow his mouthful of food, Benedick replied, “Because I’m fucking hungry!” The doctor then patiently explained that Benedick would not be allowed to eat, since his failing kidneys were in no shape to flush any toxins from his body. Heck, he couldn’t even have pain medicine, much less cheeseburgers!

An ambulance finally delivered the disgruntled Benedick to the correct hospital, where he started on his dialysis regimen. Having no solid food and being hooked up to a kidney machine was one thing, but no pain medication was another. Benedick was tough, and he knew it, but the pain radiating from his wounds was agony. Almost like an awful addiction, the pain kept Benedick wired and awake. He knew that he was in the hospital’s “to die” ward, and that nobody expected him to make it, but he wasn’t going to give up easily. A few days after his arrival, there came a welcome relief to the monotony of pain and boredom – bullets came flying through the window. The hospital was under attack. It was almost comforting. Benedick thought to himself, “Now here is something I can deal with.” But as he began the mental preparation for action he quickly came up short, thinking, “Crap. I can’t do anything. I don’t have any feet.” A few seconds later, while the bullets were still flying and Benedick was wondering what to do, a medic entered the room carrying a carbine. Plainly, though, the medic was mystified by both the weapon and the situation, and Benedick asked him, “Son, do you know how to use that thing?” The medic responded, “Not really, sir.” Benedick rolled his eyes and then barked, “Well then give it to me and get the hell out of here.” Now armed, Benedick slid to the floor and turned his hospital bed over for use as a makeshift fort. A few minutes later, after the enemy firing had died down, a bemused doctor poked his head into Benedick’s room where he saw the double amputee ready to fight in his own private Alamo. The doctor shook his head and told Benedick that the medic really needed the weapon back; Benedick was not going to need a weapon where he was going. He was headed home.

As it turned out what the military meant by “headed home” was that Benedick was first off to a hospital in Japan, where he endured more surgeries but got good news when his kidneys resumed their normal function, and then to Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center Hospital in Denver, Colorado, for another round of operations. It was only in Colorado, after he had been joined by Nancy and Jack Junior, that doctors finally cut off the last bit of bone protruding from his stumps, closed his wounds, and began the process of skin grafts that would get Jack Benedick ready for prostheses. After the skin grafts came the physical therapy, but then came the big day. Four and a half months after being wounded, Jack Benedick sat in the artificial limb shop in Fitzsimmons getting his new legs fitted. Once they were strapped on, the technician asked Benedick what he thought. In response, Benedick sat up, slid off of the bed and walked out of the room with a gruff goodbye. The technician watched Benedick’s departure in horror before turning to the orderly who had wheeled Benedick into the room and saying, “Hey! He can’t do that!” The orderly, all too familiar with Benedick’s now legendary stubborn streak, replied, “You go tell him. I’m not.” Leaving the bemused orderly behind, Benedick walked to his first session of physical therapy with his new limbs and opened the door. In the room sat an army doctor, who fully expected to see a man in a wheelchair – a man who was unable to walk. The doctor stared at Jack Benedick, looked him up and down, turned a bit red in the face, and said, “You can’t do that! We have to teach you how to walk again!” Benedick calmly replied, “Well sir, I didn’t forget how to walk.” The doctor spluttered for a moment and then replied, “But what if you fall down?” Benedick answered, “Well, I didn’t forget how to get up either.”

Although he was up and mobile, Jack Benedick still had to undergo weeks of therapy to build up his strength – weeks of monotony that left the young lieutenant with a mounting case of cabin fever. He had to do something – anything instead of just lying in bed, practicing walking, and doing leg exercises. Relief came in the form of a pretty young nurse who asked Benedick if he would like to go skiing. It seemed that there was a program that twinned amputees with patients from the local children’s hospital for ski lessons as part of their rehabilitation. Benedick made a show of looking at a calendar before answering, “What the hell. It doesn’t look like I have anything else to do today.” The trip to the slopes was fun, even though he had a hard time keeping his balance and fell down more than he skied at first, and the gruff warrior enjoyed the company of the children in the crystal-clear mountain air. It all seemed so natural, so peaceful, so right. Benedick filed it away – when he got out of the army, he was going to ski. The thought of having no legs never even entered his mind.

After returning to the hospital, Benedick received a visit from one of his doctors, who informed him that, since he was making such progress in his recovery, he was slated to be released, retired from the army, and turned over to the Veterans Administration. Benedick was indignant. They were going to retire him? No way in hell. He had lost his legs by playing army and he was going to stay in the damn army. The doctor let Benedick vent, but then told him that the decision was out of both of their hands. The army just didn’t need double amputees. Seconds after the doctor had left, Jack Benedick was on the phone with his old battalion commander, Colonel Tutwiler, who, in turn, called his old brigade commander General Fulton. The two men knew Benedick well; they knew that he was about the most hard-charging soldier they had ever met. If he said he could still serve without legs, they believed him. Tutwiler and Fulton placed a few phone calls and pulled a few strings, and Jack Benedick received his orders. He was off to Fort Benning for the advanced officer training course in preparation for his new command.

His Fort Benning classmates looked at Jack Benedick with a sense of awe – especially impressed when he decided to go on runs while wearing short pants. Hardly anyone complained about the difficulty of the course when Benedick was around. If he could do it, so could they. After training, Benedick, now a captain, reported to Fort Carson, Colorado, to serve as a company commander in the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. He walked in the door at brigade headquarters, where the major who served as brigade executive officer was seated at a desk reading his personnel file. The major looked at Benedick, glanced down at his legs, and gave him the bad news. There was no place for a double-amputee officer in the 1st Brigade. Benedick looked the major square in the eye and said, “Give me a chance. If I can’t cut it, I’ll retire in six months. You have my word.” Shaking his head and grimacing, the major replied, “All right. I’m going to hold you to it.” A few months later, it was the major, not Jack Benedick, who retired. Before he left, the major sent Benedick a formal letter of apology. Not only had he been able to hack it, Benedick had proven to be the best company commander in the entire outfit.

After his time as company commander, Benedick served two stints in battalion staff positions before attending Command and General Staff College and receiving promotion to the rank of major. Budget cuts interrupted a slated tour in Germany, and in 1977 Jack Benedick transferred to San Francisco to work in the Office of the Inspector General. While adjusting to the new position, Benedick received jarring news. A cordial officer informed him that a change in regulations meant that remaining on active duty put his eventual military disability benefit in jeopardy. As the young officer closed his briefcase Benedick responded, “What? Does this mean that my legs will grow back? What a nice surprise.” Two weeks later Jack Benedick was out of the US military. Not knowing quite what to do with himself, Benedick decided to move with his family to Colorado, so that he could pursue a future as a skier, an avocation he had kept up since the day that kind nurse had entered his room during his initial rehab.

Jack Benedick soon became a fixture on the ski slopes of Colorado, at the same time that local resorts, business sponsors, and the international sports world were coming to realize the importance of competitive sports for disabled athletes. Benedick became a tireless advocate of disabled sports, skiing competitively from 1979 to 1986, helping to create the US Disabled Ski Team, and winning a silver medal in the Winter Paralympics in 1980 and two bronze medals in the World Championships in 1984. In 1986, Benedick took on a formal position of Director of the US Disabled Ski Team, which he held until his retirement in 1995. He was also a member of the United States Olympic Committee from 1984 to 1988 and was instrumental in having disabled skiing added to the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary as a demonstration sport, where the US team won four of the available six medals. Benedick also served as director of the able-bodied cross-country ski team and was team leader for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.

After retirement, Jack Benedick not only remained involved in skiing but also took up weightlifting and worked as a white-water rafting guide. What caught his attention most, though, was scuba diving. Entranced by the tranquility and near weightlessness of diving, Benedick decided that he had found his new avocation and quickly received certification as a dive master. Hoping to teach scuba diving to other people with disabilities, Benedick applied for his instructor’s license. A few days later a call came in to Benedick’s local scuba shop from a representative with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. There was no way that they were going to let an applicant with no legs take the test. Sensing a challenge, Benedick got on the phone and spoke to a crusty old navy diver who informed him that, while he had squeaked through qualification to this point, this was the end of the line. Benedick shot back that he had not squeaked through anything, to which the diving instructor replied, “Be that as it may, you ain’t ready for this test!” “Well, how about I get on a plane to California and challenge you to a street fight,” Benedick retorted. “If you beat my ass, I quit. If I beat yours, I get to take the test. Since I don’t have any legs, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to beat me.” Not quite knowing how to react to the challenge, the instructor relented, and within a few weeks Jack Benedick joined the Professional Association of Diving Instructors as a fully-fledged member.

It first came on as an odd feeling of imbalance while he was skiing during the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer. He wasn’t sure, but something just didn’t feel quite right, kind of like having had too much to drink. While the odd feeling did dim over time, it never went away, and sometimes came back even worse than before, so Jack Benedick did something he loathed – he went to the doctor. After a battery of tests the results were in – Jack Benedick was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. While he immediately went on medication, over time the symptoms worsened and came to include the uncontrollable trembling so commonly associated with the affliction. The fighter, the man who had taken up skiing when he had lost his legs, had to give up the things that he loved. No more skiing. No more scuba. Maybe no more driving or walking. But Jack Benedick wasn’t going down without a fight. He volunteered for an experimental procedure and had two electrodes implanted deep inside his brain designed to stop the tremors. The treatment worked, and part of the battle was won – but the vertigo was still there; no more skiing or scuba yet. Out of all the battles he had ever fought, it seemed that the struggle against Parkinson’s was going to be the hardest yet. How could he fight something he couldn’t even see?

After John Young’s reunion with his father in the International Harvester plant in Minneapolis, he gave his family the news; he was headed back to Vietnam. There was still a war going on, and that was why Young had joined in the first place, to fight for his country. It just didn’t make any sense to come home with a job still to be done. Following a short leave, Young made his way back to Vietnam, where he served another 18 months as a staff NCO in the headquarters of II Field Force. It was the summer of 1969 when John Young finally returned home for good. As he walked through the airport in Minneapolis wearing his uniform, Young couldn’t help noticing that everyone looked away from him. They weren’t yelling or screaming – they didn’t care enough to pay him any attention at all, whether good or bad. Arriving home for a second time to the hugs and kisses of his family, with $800 saved up and nowhere in particular he needed to be, John Young settled down in his parents’ basement to take something of an extended breather, which for him meant drinking. Young had started drinking heavily in Vietnam, to help him sleep – a habit that followed him home and became one of the central facets of his life. While drinking away his meager savings, Young explored a civilian world that had become both foreign and forbidding. He found that he had little in common with his old friends, who had moved on with their lives, started jobs, and gotten married. Life had gone on in an America that didn’t seem to care at all about the young men it had sent off to war and destruction. To Young, the civilian lives that his one-time friends cherished so deeply seemed somehow mundane, even petty. All their fretting over mortgages, schools, and time clocks – all the needless civilian hustle and bustle. John Young and his friends in Charlie Company had lived the most difficult and rewarding life there could be – a life of overwhelming power and emotion. They had lived life-and-death decisions that really mattered, but their moment was gone. Homecoming had brought on a complex tapestry of emotions: guilt for not still being in Vietnam, anger at society’s complacency, sorrow for friends long lost, guilt for having survived when so many had not. In the confusion, alcohol was his only constant.

In January 1970, John Young picked himself up, dusted himself off, and decided that it was time to get started on his own civilian life. He took a job as a still photographer with a Minneapolis television station, and eloped with a girl named Kathy after a whirlwind courtship. They rented a small house, and she had a good job; the Youngs were the perfect, well-adjusted middle-class couple. But all the while Vietnam remained close to the surface, ever-present in John Young’s psyche. Every night he had to drink himself to sleep to ward off the nightmares but still woke up drenched in sweat. Every day was a struggle to find meaning and to avoid anger. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. The world seemed so inconsequential, and life seemed so numb. For the next few years, Young bounced from job to job – always achieving success, but never achieving happiness. Every Friday he would collect his paycheck, make his way to one of the local watering holes and start his drinking. He drank to sleep. He slept so he could work. He worked so he could make money to drink so he could sleep – a vicious cycle that quickly and completely destroyed his marriage. One night Young awoke in a haze and heard Viet Cong in the living room. He crept to his closet, grabbed his rifle, and low-crawled into the furniture-strewn rice paddy. A few minutes later a voice came from nowhere asking him what he was doing. It was Kathy. Young got to his feet and responded, “Bridges is dead. They shot Bridges.” Kathy began to weep and helped her husband back to bed. Something – Vietnam – was eating him up on the inside. Something beyond her control.

A few months later the couple divorced – another failure. Everything John Young touched seemed to fall apart. Amid the ruins of his life, it struck Young that the only place where he had ever really found meaning and fulfillment was the military. With his discharge papers in hand, Young returned to the same recruiting office that he had visited on that long ago day in the spring of 1966. In 1974 the recruiting sergeant was different, but the results were the same. He could help Young join the military, and he could certainly help him join the infantry. In fact, Young was in luck. Due to the new Minuteman Program, he could skip training and go straight into service as a private E-3. For anyone else who had been a staff sergeant E-6 and who had worked in a corps-level tactical headquarters, the loss of three ranks might have been a deal-breaker; but not for John Young. He was ready to get to a place where others understood and valued his service. He was ready to get to a place where others understood Vietnam.

Within a month Young stood in a barracks in Bavaria, ready to report to his new unit. The army of the 1970s was different, full of discipline problems and drug use. But the officers and the NCOs were the same – honorable men who understood who John Young was – and why. Flourishing in the comfortable surroundings, he once again pinned on new ranks in near record time. Vietnam was still there. The pain was still there, but these guys understood why it was there, and that helped. There was also the institutionalized drinking culture of the army NCOs. Booze flowed freely, from bottles stashed in desks to the NCO club. Young was able to mask his growing dependence on alcohol behind a façade of boozy comradeship. The military was the perfect place for someone who was still troubled by war to hide in plain sight. Having met a pretty German girl named Helga, Young moved to an apartment off base. The couple was happy, and even spoke of marriage, but they both knew better. Young would eventually return to the United States, and Helga would never leave Germany. But still the years slipped slowly by, years that were almost happy.

In the late fall of 1977, orders came in that changed everything. Young was being transferred to Fort Ord, California. It was about the last place in the world he wanted to go, and about the last time he wanted to go – Christmas time. But, orders were orders, and Young said goodbye to Helga and shipped out to New Jersey, from where he would drive his car to Fort Ord. The parting was tough on Young, tougher than he was willing to admit. On the long, cross-country odyssey Young began to think – began to think of how alone he was. He had no family – no wife and children. He didn’t even have any friends. As he thought about Helga, his mind went back to 1975, when they had watched the fall of Saigon together on the television. The war, the most meaningful thing in his life, had ended in defeat. All of the savagery and loss had been for nothing. The solitude of the journey west was devastating. John Young had nothing, had nobody – and the central event of his life meant nothing. Somewhere in Texas, Young stopped to pick up a few bottles of whiskey and drank his way to California. On December 23, Young reported in to his new company. He needed them – he needed somebody. But the company was on a Christmas stand down. The first sergeant welcomed Young aboard, but then told him that he might as well go and get a hotel room and report in after Christmas.

For any other soldier that would have come as great news – go ahead and have a merry Christmas and a few extra days off. But for Young it was nearly lethal. He bought more whiskey, checked into a cheap hotel room and drank himself into the depths of depression. He was tired – tired of life. Young just sat there, perched on the end of a rumpled bed, trying to drink enough to pull the trigger on his handgun. Nearby there was a phone book, and, through his blurry sight, Young noticed a number on the back cover, a number for a suicide prevention hotline. He called. A woman picked up, one who was well trained enough to listen to his drunken ramblings; one who was well trained enough to get his location and call the authorities. The feminine voice on the other end of the line told John Young, “You don’t want to kill yourself. You are not a killer.” Young could only reply, “But I’m already a killer. I’m already a killer.” Seconds later there was a knock at the hotel door; it was the police. The officers, calm professionals, asked John Young for his gun. He gave it up voluntarily, and then rode with the officers back to Fort Ord, where he was admitted to the psychiatric wing of the base military hospital.

After a two-week stint in the hospital, and with a prescription for an anti-depressant in hand, Young returned to his unit, where he served as a training NCO. Needing the hard work, the comradeship, and the distraction, Young threw himself into his new job. He was the model soldier, always there when you needed him, and quickly rose in the estimation of his superior officers. After only a short time, Young was singled out for success and chosen to serve as part of a field team within the Inspector General’s office. He even got married again and rented a home in Seaside, where he and his wife, Valerie, awaited the birth of their first child. In 1980 Young received even more good news. He had been chosen to attend Drill Instructors’ School. He knew that a stint as a drill instructor would not be easy, but it was one of those things that you have to do in the military to get your ticket punched. DI school meant that John Young was on his way up. Young, his wife Valerie, and their young son Joseph, packed up and headed off to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to start a new stage in their lives. The couple bought a small house on 5 acres of land outside the town of Fletcher; they even planned to farm a little bit. Having reached the bottom, John Young had clawed his way back. He had his career, his family – even a farm. But through it all, the drinking had continued and worsened. He didn’t know that he had a problem. Hell, he liked drinking. It kept the demons at bay.

While he had known that life as a drill instructor was going to be demanding, John Young had no idea of the strain it would place on his marriage. He had to be up and out of bed at 3:30am to drive to Fort Sill and roust the trainees for reveille. He worked doing exhausting physical labor, including two 5-mile runs every day, seven days a week, and rarely made it home before midnight. Barely able to keep his eyes open, Young spent what little home time he had drinking and then sleeping before the alarm went off again. On the few short breaks that he received during gaps in the training cycle, all Young wanted to do was drink and sleep enough to get caught up a bit. It was no way to live. Caring for a toddler, and with her husband either drunk, asleep, or gone, Valerie felt abandoned. The couple grew apart, and what conversations they had were often arguments. Just when he needed it most, Young received some very welcome news. He had been chosen for the senior NCO course at Fort Benning, the last ticket that he needed punched before promotion to sergeant first class (E-7). He had fought through the tough patch, and things were looking up again.

The course of study at Fort Benning was slated to last six weeks, but almost immediately John Young sensed trouble. No matter when he called home, or how often, he couldn’t get Valerie on the phone. He called multiple times a day, often in the dead of night, and still nothing. What the hell was going on? Not sure what to do, and in something of a panic, John Young just got in his car and left Fort Benning, without any orders. He drove back to his home in Fletcher and eventually located Valerie and Joseph. She said that she was sorry, but she couldn’t take it anymore. She had filed for divorce and was going to take their son and leave. The next day Young was called before his battalion commander at Fort Sill for a classic military dressing down. Who the hell did he think he was just to up and leave the senior NCO school? It didn’t matter what kind of damn personal problems he was having: NCOs in this man’s military don’t go AWOL! There was no way in hell that he was ever going to get another shot at senior NCO school. In fact, he was going to be relieved of drill instructor duty. Maybe that would teach him a goddamn lesson!

John Young’s marriage was over. His short life as a father was over. His career was over. He had five days of leave before taking his new assignment, so he went home to drink. Sitting there among the empty whiskey bottles of his life, Young was back in his parents’ basement in 1969. Everything since then had been for nothing. He hadn’t moved one damn inch in 13 years. He was alone with no life, nothing except booze and pain. Young got up from his chair, and grabbed his whiskey and $300 in cash. He rummaged through the house for his weapons and as much ammunition as he could find, and then he went out the front door and got into his pickup truck. He didn’t even bother to close the door, because he wasn’t coming back. Randomly heading west, Young began to formulate a plan. He would find a lonely spot, perhaps among some rocks on a hill, take up a defensive position, and start shooting people. Someone was going to pay for his pain. After a while the police would respond, and Young would die in a hail of gunfire. He would die like a warrior – the way he should have died in Vietnam. For days Young drove west, spending the nights drinking in shabby roadside motels – through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. But somehow or another he just never found the right spot, and then he was at the end of the road on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He had run out of country. He stood there and watched the breakers for a few minutes and then just gave up. He couldn’t even kill himself right. Crawling back into the cab of his pickup, Young drove down the highway until he saw a California State Highway Patrol office. He went in and surrendered to the surprised officer behind the desk.

A psychiatric team transferred Young to Letterman Army Medical Center, where a lieutenant colonel interviewed him for several hours. After grilling him with questions, some of which were about Vietnam while others seemingly made no sense at all, the officer leaned forward and said, “Well sergeant, you have PTSD and can’t be a soldier anymore.” PTSD? Young had never heard of that. What was it? The sympathetic colonel described the symptoms: nightmares, emotional numbness, hyper alertness, anger, guilt – it all seemed to fit John Young to a T. As he sat there trying to take it all in, the officer informed Young that he would be sent to Fort Sill for his discharge. As he left the room, the colonel poked his head back in for just a moment and added, almost as an afterthought, “Don’t worry, sergeant, once you are discharged just go over to the VA. They will have some help for you.”

The military couldn’t wait to get rid of John Young – he was discharged within a week of his arrival back at Fort Sill. Everything in his life was gone, except for the booze, so Young went home to drink. It was about a month before he thought again about the colonel’s final words and decided to go visit the VA. Even after all he had been through, John Young could barely admit it, but he needed help. Young walked up to the reception desk at the VA in Oklahoma City, where the receptionist looked up and said, “Can I help you?” Young replied that he was a career soldier who had been discharged due to PTSD and that the army had told him to come and talk to the VA. Although the receptionist looked sympathetic, her response was crushing. “I’m sorry sir, but the VA does not recognize PTSD as a disability. We really don’t have anything to offer you.” There was nothing left. Nothing. John Young went home to drink. Maybe he hadn’t had the guts to kill himself with a gun or to die in a hail of gunfire, but he could damn sure drink himself to death. Young held down a job to pay for the booze – they even thought he was a model employee – but that is all he wanted to do: drink. And it was working. He began to have alcohol-induced seizures and blackouts. The pain was going to be gone.

One day, out of the blue, John Young’s parents showed up and bundled him into their car. A friend had located them in their new home in Picayune, Mississippi, and had told them of John’s condition. They went to pick him up before he died. In July 1985, John Young checked into an alcohol treatment program at a local VA and got clean. He didn’t believe that he could go even a few hours without drinking, but after the 28-day program, John Young knew that he would never drink again. He got a job selling cars at a local dealership near his parents’ home and began to make good money. But now, sober and alone, Young had no defenses against PTSD and the memories of Vietnam. Slowly they ate at him more and more. As usual he worked hard and well, but he felt isolated. He moved out of his parents’ home and got his own place, but he became more and more of a loner. He couldn’t trust himself to deal with people. They didn’t understand. They didn’t want to understand. It was 1993 before Young ran across a random advertisement in the local paper. “Vietnam Vets. Lonely? Depressed? Need help? Please call.” The voice on the other end of the phone informed Young that the VA now had help for veterans with PTSD and told him how to gain access to treatment. Taking a gamble, and a major leap of faith, Young contacted the VA in New Orleans and applied for the inpatient program. A few weeks later, he was there, filling out forms and getting ready for who-knew-what. Then it happened. Dr Karen Thompson asked Young to her office. He sat in a comfortable chair, and she sat behind her desk. She leaned in, looked him in the eyes and said, “Tell me about Vietnam.” A simple request, elegant and vitally important. It had been 25 years since John Young had served with Charlie Company – 25 long years. And finally someone asked – someone cared about it all. He had been holding it all in – the wonderfully good and the horrifically bad – for so long, alone. Someone finally wanted to know, and he could begin to let it all out. That single meeting saved John Young’s life.

Having left the funeral in Arroyo Grande, Jacque Peterson sat alone in her apartment with her young son Jimmy and just cried. At age 18, she could still almost feel the excitement of her wedding day, of her marriage to Don – there was no way that it could be over; Don was still out there somewhere. As the weeks went by, Jacque moved to a farm that her family owned outside of Dinuba, California, near Fresno, where she and Jimmy were able to find some solitude. While there, Jacque watched from a distance as several of her relatives and friends came home from tours in Vietnam. Loved ones were coming back to everyone but her. She kept waiting for the knock on her own door, to see Don again, but the knock never came. She heard stories, stories of heroism in which Don had given his life to save others. But she so desperately wished that he would come back to her.

Alone, and in frantic hope of finding a future for both herself and her young son, Jacque met and married David Bomann, who promised to love and take care of little Jimmy like he was his own. In some ways, David loved Jacque and Jimmy too much, and that is where the trouble started. He didn’t want to be Jimmy’s stepfather; he wanted to be his dad. To avoid confusion, the couple cut all ties with the Peterson family and never spoke of Don Peterson. He was the past; the Bomann family was the future. It pained Jacque greatly, but she went along with the charade. Down deep she knew that Don Peterson was the irreplaceable love of her life, her soulmate. But she had to put him and his memory into the past. It was for the best. It would give her and Jimmy a new life.

The rural life of the Bomann family, which quickly grew to include two more children, seemed idyllic. Jimmy enjoyed the acres of vineyards and going to the small local school. But as he grew up, Jimmy began to notice something odd. It didn’t hit him all at once, but built slowly over time. A vague hint here, an unexplained oddity there. His father, David, didn’t seem to treat him the same as he did his other children. The more he thought about it, the more curious it all became. He didn’t look like David. He didn’t think like David. He didn’t walk or talk like David. Unsure of so much, Jimmy began to rebel – he drank and he got into trouble at school. Jacque didn’t know the exact nature of the problem, but she had a pretty good guess. As her eldest son questioned his place in the world, Jacque came to her own realization that she had made a mistake. She tried so hard to make her marriage work, especially for the children, but she now understood that losing Don had left her incomplete. She had tried to fill the gaping hole that his loss had left in her soul – she had reached out for love and a future. But it had been a mistake. Nobody could replace Don Peterson. As her marriage to David crumbled, Jacque knew what she had to do. She had to tell Jimmy about his real father.

It was all so much for Jimmy to take in; David wasn’t his father? He had a different dad who had died in Vietnam? There were so many questions. Who was he? What was he? Suddenly being Jimmy Bomann didn’t make sense anymore. And the guy who could help him make sense of his life wasn’t there – he was gone, lost when he was only an infant. Jimmy felt nothing but sorrow for his mother, who had plainly loved this man named Don Peterson so deeply, but who had been forced to push even his memory away so far. But he also felt betrayed and conflicted: betrayed by David posing as his father and forcing his real father into the past; conflicted because he loved and respected David. David was the only father he had ever known. Two fathers warred for his soul, but one was only a faint whisper on a barely remembered breeze. Jimmy had to learn, had to go back into the past and rescue Don Peterson.

As her divorce from David Bomann became final, Jacque decided to do what she could to help Jimmy on his journey by moving her family to Pismo Beach, where he could be reunited with the Petersons. For Don’s parents, his siblings, and the entire extended family, watching Jimmy walk into the room was wonderful but heart wrenching. At age 16, Jimmy was a carbon copy of his father. It was as though Don had come back to them whole and young – unchanged – after so many sad years of absence. There were tears for what had been missed, but there was also great joy at a family reunited. Jacque went back to school, taking courses toward a nursing degree, as she and her children started life over again. Jimmy went to a much larger school now, a school that offered him more chances to indulge his rebellious side, and he was a constant presence at the doors of the various Petersons. He wanted to learn everything he could about his father. What had he been like? Was he athletic? Was he an artist? Was he a surfer? Everything. He heard all of the stories about his dad, comfortable and well-worn stories that other families swap over Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners to nods of group remembrance. But to Jimmy they were all so new. The thing that was most obvious was that the Petersons loved Don deeply and missed him dearly. After nearly 16 years their pain was still fresh, so near the surface and so constant. Vietnam to them was not the past but a living, organic part of their beings. The shared agony of the Petersons’ unhealed scars opened new wounds in Jimmy. Instead of finding closure, finding a father, he was more confused than ever.

Jacque graduated as a Licensed Vocational Nurse in 1985, sometimes working three jobs to keep food on the table. She focused her remaining energy on her children, helping them in any way shecould. Along the way, she slowly drifted apart from the Petersons again, but she has never forgotten Don. His love and the short time of contentedness that they once knew remain at the core of her being. Although she still works, is outwardly vibrant, and remains devoted to her family, in her soul is a stillness. It is only when she thinks or speaks of Don that she feels truly at peace.

Jimmy needed direction. The confusion that was his life, and the drinking that played an ever more important role in his daily routine, were threatening to get the best of him. Before he had even graduated from high school, Jimmy enlisted in the navy. Service would give him the discipline and the focus that he lacked. But his two years of service were a rough ride. He was still rebellious, not a trait valued by the military, and still liked to drink. He did, however, gain focus and maturity. Jimmy took back the last name of Peterson and decided to embark on a career in the music business. But there was still a hole in his life. He had collected shards of his father – like brightly colored bits of a shattered mosaic. The individual pieces were beautiful, but he didn’t know how to fit them back together again. He still didn’t know his father. But then came a call from his uncle Rich, his father’s youngest brother. Some guys named Jim Dennison and John Bauler had found his name in a phone book. They had known his father, served with him, and had been there the day that he had died. They were going to have a reunion, and they wanted to know if Jimmy and the rest of the Petersons wanted to go. Jimmy didn’t have to think long. Maybe this would be the way to put the memory of Don Peterson back together again.

After his drunken farewell to Vietnam, Jim Dennison had returned home to Chicago. For a while he just drank a lot and took in the world around him, before giving college a try and flunking out. Dennison was engaged for a while, but “treated his fiancée like shit,” which resulted in him getting unceremoniously dumped. Dennison jumped around from job to job, drinking all the while, before settling down, getting married, and finding work selling construction equipment. Climbing the corporate ladder, Dennison was first transferred to Colorado in 1978 and then to San Diego in 1981. Ever since the end of the war in Vietnam, Dennison had remained in contact with John Bauler, one of the Charlie Company originals who had hailed from Chicago but was brought up in California. Since Bauler lived in the San Diego area, the two often got together over drinks and swapped reminiscences of their lives as part of Charlie Company. As one of the large California contingent in Charlie Company, Bauler had fleeting contact with others from across the unit. It was over drinks in the mid 1980s that Bauler and Dennison, both half in the bag, thought that they should try to get into contact with as many Charlie Company veterans as possible and have a reunion. They didn’t even know where to start – so they began with John Sclimenti. That wasn’t a very common last name. Surely there couldn’t be too damn many Sclimentis crawling around? Wasn’t he from the Simi Valley? They both thought so. One phonebook later, Dennison was on the horn. A male voice answered. Not quite sure how to proceed, Dennison apologized if he was wrong and then went on to say that he was a Charlie Company veteran looking for the John Sclimenti who had fought in Vietnam in 1967. The voice answered, “Damn! This is him. I’m John Sclimenti. How the hell are you doing, Dennison?”

From there the ball started rolling quickly. Every veteran they contacted seemed to be in touch with at least one other veteran. Lilley, Nall, Benedick, Wilson, Cortright; the contact list grew and grew. Every time there was a call, the voice on the other end was shocked and overjoyed. Where had everyone been all these years? Some people were just impossible to find – folks like John Young, Charlie Nelson, or Danny Bailey. Their names were too common, and nobody knew where they had wound up or even where to begin looking. It was Bauler’s idea to place advertisements in the most popular veterans’ publications. Hopefully somebody would read them and call. After months of work, the list of names had grown to more than 40. Someone had even found the Petersons. Holy God. They were going to get to meet Don’s son. Then the letters started coming in. John Young wrote:

 

Well Hello fer Chrissakes,

The odds of all this coming about are too boggling to contemplate. I got home from work the other night and found my first copy of the DAV magazine since I joined a month or so ago, and I almost tossed it, knowing that there is rarely anything in it to actually read, but I sat down and ate supper while I paged through it. I got to the reunion page and began to glance down the list. I just damn near choked when I saw the ad. I read it five or six times before I believed my eyes. Just a Riverine Force reunion would have been a mild surprise. A battalion reunion would have been cause for some satisfaction. A company reunion would have been joyous. But to see the very platoon I belonged to was just too much. I’m still shaking.

For the first time in a long time I have something to live for.

My God, my God, the memories.

Enough of this for now – let me finish and get this mailed.

I simply cannot say how much this means to me. It has come at a crisis in my life.

The first reunion of Charlie Company was a rather small affair in Las Vegas in July of 1989 and mainly included members of the 1st Platoon – the men Dennison and his friends knew how best to contact. But as the years went by, Dennison and Bauler reached out to more and more people – the Geiers, the Kenneys, Tom Conroy, Colonel Tutwiler, Captain Larson, Willie McTear, John Bradfield. Only a few, once contacted, chose not to attend. Danny Bailey, who had been so badly wounded on the day that Lieutenant Black had been killed, sent a letter in the childlike handwriting that John Young remembered so well after the loss of Benny Bridges.

 

Jim Dennison,

This is Danny F. Bailey… I don’t know what happened to all. I was wounded twice. Was in too many hospitals going home, I don’t like talking about it. I know we all had it rough, we who made it. It was hard to forget. I’m married with two kids, both girls. I won’t come [to the reunion]. I stay in one place. But hope all are well, I don’t work anymore, had to give it up. I fish, keeps my mind off things the VA said. I’ve ben married for a long time. I treat my family super and they are always there for me.

Bill Reynolds, from 2nd Platoon and who had been the first to reach Bill Geier’s side on June 19, came home from Vietnam to a wonderful marriage and landed a good job at Lockheed. All the while, though, he remained interested in Vietnam, in what had happened to him and his brothers from Charlie Company. Over the years, he remained in touch with only a few of his buddies from Fort Riley, but in the mid-1990s he got the idea to found a website that would serve as a clearing house for everything Charlie Company – a place for people to get together, a place for the unit’s history, a place to remember. In his efforts to gather the unit’s people and story, Reynolds made contacts across the company, and eventually came across the burgeoning reunions. He couldn’t believe his good luck – the unit that he loved so much was back together, at least part of it. He went to the next reunion and got together with Dennison. With the help of Reynolds, and through the vehicle of his website, the reunions continued and grew to include almost everyone. Charlie Company, the family that had gone to Vietnam, was back together again.

The boys of Charlie Company, now graying, had shared the most energizing, tragic, heroic, happy, and soul-wrenching times of their lives in 1967, times that had come to an all-too abrupt halt, whether ended by a sniper’s bullet or by a brief goodbye while running to catch a flight home. Now, after decades had passed – after an entire lifetime had passed – they were getting back together. Many were worried. Would they recognize anybody? So much water had gone under the bridge; they all had new lives, children – even grandchildren. Could they still share anything in common with these people they had known so long ago in a world that was so foreign and so violent? In their ones and twos the Charlie Company veterans began to drift into their Las Vegas hotel. Terry McBride, always so tough and always so irreverent, who knew that seeing his old comrades was going to be one of the saving graces of his life, broke the ice. He looked around and said, “Who the hell are all you people? I served with a bunch of young, skinny guys. But all I see here is a bunch of fat old turds!” From somewhere farther back in the crowd, Jimmie Salazar shot back, “These turds might be older than hell, but they all look damn pretty to me!” With the niceties out of the way, the boys of Charlie Company began to shake hands, shed tears, and hug one another. They were home.

Old friends sought each other out to speak of events that only they could remember. Tim Fischer and Ron Vidovic talked in a corner about the mining outside Dong Tam to which Vidovic lost his leg. What had life been like since then? Steve Hopper and Tom Conroy quietly discussed the battle of October 6, when they lost Alldridge and Burkhead. What bravery Burkhead had shown by going after his fallen friend even when he was so short that he could have gone home in less than a month. Charlie Nelson ran into Dave Jarczewski, who was nursing a drink at the bar. Although he had given up drinking as part of his life of solitude back on the reservation, Nelson sat down and ordered himself a shot. The two got royally and exuberantly drunk while discussing the fighting on May 15 when they had both been so badly wounded. It had been such a terrible day, but as the drinks continued coming both men slowly came to better terms with their past. It just helped so much to talk to someone else who understood, who really understood. The two men, getting up from their barstools arm in arm, agreed that what they wanted most was to meet Don Peterson’s son one day and to come face to face with Lieutenant Thompson. Wouldn’t that be great? To give Thompson a piece of their minds?

Like a family getting together and swapping comfortable and comforting stories over a holiday feast, the boys of Charlie Company talked, wept, and shared just about everything – their pasts and their presents. Everyone had heard that one of their number had lost both of his legs, only to overcome adversity and become a skier. They couldn’t wait to find out who it was, to ask him questions. From the middle of a small crowd of men, Doug Wilson, who had blown three VC out of a haystack with an LAW on the long-ago battle of May 15, turned to Jim Dennison and said, “Is the guy without the legs going to be here?” Standing only a few yards away, Jack Benedick piped up, “I’m him, and I’m here.” Wilson looked him up and down, evidently not quite believing that a man with no legs was just standing there, so Benedick rolled up his pants legs to show his prostheses. Immediately a group of Charlie Company veterans crowded in for what was sure to be a good, and hard-drinking, story. Wilson fumbled for what to say next: “Geez, sir. I’m sorry, but I didn’t recognize you after so damn long.” “Well, I wouldn’t have recognized me either,” Benedick replied. “I used to be taller.” Having ordered enough drinks to make it through the story, the group went to a nearby table – they just had to hear what had happened to Jack Benedick. How had he lost his legs? Benedick took a deep swig of his whiskey, looked around and began by pointing to his prostheses: “Well, fellas. I fucked up. I wished that my dick was closer to the ground, and this is what I got!” Benedick went on to share the real story, followed by others chiming in about their own lives, families, and brushes with the VA.

Nobody had noticed it – a sign at one of Charlie Company’s first reunions. The hotel in Las Vegas had several events going on that weekend, with each function warranting its own black felt announcement sign with white plastic letters directing participants to the correct room. One sign steered Charlie Company veterans to a second-floor ballroom, while another read, “Thompson wedding.” Perhaps if they had noticed it, the boys of Charlie Company would not have made the connection – it was just too outlandish even to consider. But, while Jack Benedick sat there telling the story of his lost legs, the door to the meeting room opened, and there stood a tuxedo-clad Sam Thompson – the man who had ordered Ski’s squad out into the rice paddy on May 15. The man who had rushed 3rd Platoon into a minefield in August. His daughter was getting married in the same hotel. For a moment or two, Thompson just stood there and looked around. All conversation came to a halt and the room went totally silent as the men realized who it was. At a few tables animated conversations broke out – Tim Fischer, Ron Vidovic, Charlie Nelson, and Dave Jarczewski all wondering what the hell Thompson was doing here. One or two of the men got up and headed Thompson’s way. Seated at one of the tables nearest the door, Jack Benedick got to his feet and was the first by Thompson’s side. He looked Thompson in the eye and said, “You are going to have to leave. You aren’t welcome here.” The look on Benedick’s face told Thompson everything, that if he hung around there was going to be real trouble. Thompson looked up and made an exaggerated effort to scan the room again and turned to Benedick and said, “Nobody I wanted to see here anyway,” and turned to leave. As the apparition of the worst part of Charlie Company’s collective past left the room, Benedick closed the door and announced that nobody was going to follow him. This was their reunion and it was damn well time to get back to it.

For many of the families of the men who never made it home, the Charlie Company reunions were a chance to get to know the last friends their sons, husbands, and fathers ever had. It was a chance to come to terms with the most important losses of their lives. Barbara Kenney was there to renew ties with Tom Conroy, Bill Reynolds, and Tim Fischer, who had already helped her better understand the loss of her husband. Jesse Ramos was there, a Vietnam veteran in his own right. He felt comfortable and comforted among his brother’s friends in Charlie Company. He understood their pain, and they assuaged his. Bernice Geier was in attendance along with her son Bill’s siblings and their spouses. They carried a collection of photos of Bill as a young man to share with his friends. They especially wanted to meet one of Bill’s closest buddies, Idoluis Casares, whom Bill had known as “Bear,” and to learn more about Bill’s loss while acquainting his comrades with who Bill had been before he had been drafted. The reunions meant different things to each of the family members; Phil Ferro’s sister, Diane Hawley, was deeply moved to see how everyone remembered her brother like it was yesterday. Barbara Kenney continued to piece together the story of her beloved husband, who had been everyone’s friend. Jesse Ramos had met kindred spirits who loved his brother as much as he did. The Geiers were so pleased that everyone wanted to know about Bill, that they cared so much. It was also somehow comforting to learn how Bill had died – he had been lost doing what he loved, helping someone else. But what meant the most to each and every one of the family members was their welcome. Charlie Company was a living, vibrant family – a family that fully embraced both them and their cherished memories. Together with the Charlie Company family, the wives, mothers, and siblings of the fallen were finally able to mourn. Their pain would never fully diminish, but they could now share both the pain and the love with others who could truly understand their loss.

A hush fell over the room as the men of Charlie Company looked up from their drinks and conversations – the door to the banquet room had opened, and standing there was Don Peterson. It was like he had walked right out of that rice paddy in 1967 and into the Flamingo Hotel. For just a few seconds nobody could believe their eyes. It couldn’t be true. Then, as people began to take in the faces of those surrounding the newcomer, faces that also resembled Don Peterson, it all became clear. At different tables in the room it all hit at the same time and murmurs went up: “Oh my God, it’s Peterson’s kid.” “Peterson’s son’s here.” Jimmy Peterson, along with Don’s parents and siblings, were greeted by an enormous outpouring of affection, an affection so great that it initially threatened to overwhelm them. Moving from table to table and from group to group, Jimmy met with pats on the back and warm embraces – all of these people, these people who welcomed him so freely, were the key to putting the pieces of his father together again. Everyone, but especially those veterans of 1st Platoon, just couldn’t wait to talk with him. For the next two days Jimmy soaked it all in, sitting with men who had for decades been rehearsing what they would say to him about that tragic day in 1967. Although his father’s friends often wept when recounting the story of his days in Vietnam, it was evident that these men were overjoyed to see him, and that in telling their stories to Pete’s son they gained some kind of closure, a sense of completeness. For Jimmy it was all so painful, to hear how his father had died, to hear of the love that these men had felt for him and still felt so long after his death. But in that pain was true understanding, a sense of who Don Peterson actually was. Don Peterson had been good, and had fought through the adversity in his own life to become the kind of man everyone in the assembled family of Charlie Company admired. Don Peterson, his father, had been loved. Was still loved. As the stories piled up – Don Peterson in Fort Riley, Don Peterson showing off Jimmy’s picture to everyone, Don Peterson talking about how he and Jimmy would play football together one day – for the first time Don Peterson came alive to his son. Jimmy could almost see his father standing there, mirrored in the eyes of the men who remembered him where Jimmy could not. Jimmy Peterson finally had a father to look up to, a father complete and whole, to guide the remainder of his life.

For everyone the reunions were cathartic, and for some they were and are life-saving. While their families and friends at home certainly meant well, many of the boys of Charlie Company had felt alone with their pain for so long. There were well-meaning doctors, ministers, wives, and children – but these men had done so much, had seen so much, that they could not bring themselves to share. But finally, reunited with their brothers, they could let it all out – a tidal wave of emotion that had been building for more than two decades. It felt so good – to Jace Johnston, to James Nall, to Doug Wilson, to Steve Hopper – just to talk. Just to talk to someone else who had been there, who knew the smells, the fear, who had been bitten by red ants, who had seen the helicopter crash on June 19. For men like Willie McTear and Charlie Nelson, being with their old comrades was the only place where they felt truly free. No amount of counseling or PTSD rap groups could ever compare. For Jimmie Salazar the reunions were more than therapeutic. He had done it – survived heart attacks and diabetes to see his brothers again. While at the reunions his mental anguish, the nightmares, and the pain simply disappeared – sometimes for months at a time. Hearing the stories of his own past, adding stories of his own, was so powerful. He was not alone; he was part of a family – a family that would never be broken up again. Aurora Salazar, who had struggled to stand by her husband through it all, had suffered so long in silence. There was treatment for the men, the veterans, but somehow everyone had forgotten that for every veteran there were wives, children, parents, and siblings – who tried to understand, tried to help, but always fell so woefully short. There was such a hopeless feeling in not being able to soothe the pain of the one you love the most in this world. At the reunions, Aurora discovered that she, too, was not alone. There was Vivian Conroy, Karen Huntsman, Jeannie Hartman, and all the rest; wives who were also struggling to help their husbands and families cope with the fallout of war. Aurora now had sisters with whom to speak and to share. She had a new family that she never knew existed.

For John Young, the reunions were almost too good to be true. At home he hardly ever slept, especially since he had given up alcohol. He hated to travel, to be so far away from the familiar, from relative safety. But at the reunions he felt safe. He slept like a baby and wore a constant smile – a smile that his sisters once told him that they had not seen since 1967. Sharing it all with others who had been there – the terror of June 19, the shooting of the Viet Cong prisoner, the death of Benny Bridges – it meant so much. It also helped that these guys remembered the good times: the beer bust on the beach at Vung Tau when they had destroyed an entire bar, the Phantom Shitter at Fort Riley, the children in the little village near the bunkers at Dong Tam. It was important to balance the bad with the good, the tragic with the outlandish. Seeing them all again was like that New Year’s Eve that Young had spent with Sergeant Hoover before they left Vietnam – the night when they had tried to remember everything. There was John Sclimenti who had bashed his head on a gateway arch while chasing a Viet Cong; there was Sergeant Crockett, still an imposing sight after so many years; there was Larry Lilley who now owned a motorcycle dealership in California; there was Steve Huntsman who he had last seen on May 15, 1967. Everything seemed right.

There was one person, though, whom John Young almost didn’t want to see – Carl Cortright. It had been so hard – the memory of crashing down beside him in that rice paddy on May 15 – to discover that Cortright, so young, so new to the unit, was paralyzed. Young had never been able to forget the last few images of Cortright being dragged over the rice paddy dike and manhandled onto a medevac chopper. It must have been agony. Young was sure that Carl Cortright blamed him for his condition. What was it like not being able to walk? What was it like having your life end at 21? What would Carl Cortright say to him? As the pressure mounted, Young saw the wheelchair. Cortright was there and was making his way through the crowd. Finally facing the moment that he had dreaded for so long, Young walked over and stuck out his hand. “Carl, I’m not sure if you recognize me, but my name is John Young.” Cortright replied that, even though he had been with Charlie Company for such a short time, he did recognize Young, and asked him how he was doing. The two exchanged pleasantries for a few moments before Young asked the question that had haunted him for years: “Carl, I just didn’t know how you were going to react to me, to what happened on that day. I understand if…” But before the final, unspoken but understood words reached Young’s lips, Cortright intervened: “John, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here.” Cortright didn’t blame him. He was alive, joyously and happily alive. Heck, he was even an athlete. As Young sat down and heard the story that Cortright spun about his life since Vietnam, it was as though a great weight was lifted from his chest. That memory, the bloody memory of May 15, would always be there, seared into Young’s consciousness. But after speaking to Carl Cortright, Young decided that he could now live with that memory. In coming together as a family again, a family that now included wives, siblings, and children, Charlie Company had taken the most important step in learning to live with Vietnam.

With much to process, Young went back to his home and solitary life in Picayune, Mississippi. He had returned from the depths of depression, depths from which few men have surfaced to tell the tale. Vietnam would always be one of the dominant forces in his life – perhaps the most dominant force. But, with the joy of looking forward to a Charlie Company reunion every year, John Young knew that he was going to live. But to what end? While he sat and contemplated the future, the telephone rang. Young absently wondered who it could be. Maybe a solicitor? He didn’t have many friends and received few calls. Picking up the receiver, Young was surprised to hear the voice of Dr Leslie Root, his PTSD therapist at the VA. What was she doing calling him at home? It turned out that there was a college professor asking if his class could meet with a group of Vietnam veterans. She wanted him to participate in the discussion. Universities taught classes on Vietnam? That was news to him. Did these students really want to know the truth? After giving it some thought Young agreed, telling Dr Root that he would be there and that he had a story to tell. He didn’t want to talk about himself but instead about Charlie Company: Bill Geier, Don Peterson, Kenny Frakes, Ron Schworer, Phil Ferro, Forrest Ramos, Fred Kenney, and all the rest. These students didn’t know their story. America didn’t know their story. The story of the boys of 1967, golden men, young draftees who had done everything that their nation had asked of them and had received so little in return – lost faces of a distant war.