Memorial Day Thought

This memorial day I am setting aside all thoughts and emotions of politics to remember a very brave, very good young man.

I only knew Timmy for a couple of weeks. In my unit in Viet Nam we had a system where when somebody new came to us we would assign them a "sea daddy" who had been in country a while and would try to head off some of the mistakes a cherry would make in those first few critical days. The new guys were all called "cherry" until they had met one of two criteria. A confirmed kill, or a wound that required leaving the field and then returning. Until that, the name was cherry. Even worse, your name was the name of your sea daddy as "his cherry." My call sign and nickname was "Benny" so Timmy was "Benny's Cherry." To everybody but me. I never called him cherry. There was just something about him that charmed me.

I was a few months into my third tour by that time. The time in country had sort of sneaked up on me. My first tour was due to end right about the time we had started to really turn the tables on the gains the enemy had made in Tet, and quite frankly, I wanted to get some. Revenge, payback, all of that. I didn't want to leave when there was so much ass in the field left to kick. So I shipped over. By the end of my second tour there simply wasn't anywhere else in the world that I felt at home. Some of it was paranoid unhinged, some of it was grandiosity on my part. I felt that my experience, my status as a warrior which allowed me to pull rank on people that had higher pay grades but less field experience was something that I felt I could use to help my guys get home alive. My arrogance in that last year probably cost as many or even more lives than it saved. It is something that I will always wonder about. I was an old salt, a hardened vet and an efficient killer, all at the age of 22. Don't laugh. A 22 year old with almost three years of continuous combat is one of the oldest people you will ever meet.

Timmy was brought in on a supply chopper. I was running through my mental roster thinking who I could assign him with when he started talking to me. He talked about the training he had been through, he talked about his home. He kept talking. He finally paused for a breath and said "You don't talk much do you sir?" I told him I wasn't anybody's "sir" that he could call me "Benny" or anything else. I told him to come with me. We got him situated and I showed him around our little firebase.

Things like that were what was happening the first few days. I found myself both softening and warming to this eager young man. He was trying to head off his own cherry mistakes. When we got our first orders for the field he came to me and asked what he should be packing, if there was a special way it should be packed. Usually a cherry packs everything they have with them and would end up discarding things that might have been appropriate on some later trip because the weight of the excess and the jungle heat would begin to tell on him. I was impressed that Timmy was asking first rather than pretending that he already knew stuff. It showed humility and a desire to perform effectively rather than a desire to look good and impress anyone.

Our first time out in the boonies he did well. As a cherry his instructions were very basic and simple. "Stay close to me. I never want you more than two steps and an arm's reach away. And shut the fuck up." He seemed to grasp some of the more important concepts right away. He saw the hard won wisdom of things like staying off the trails, never walking right out into the open, walking in the filthy water and the muck of a paddy rather than on the dry berm. I was so pleased with his performance that first time out that I gave him permission to speak on the way back. I heard him talking with some of the team who were teasing him about being "Benny's cherry." They were filling him in on how some of them hadn't heard me say six words in a row for months at a time. Barney told him that he must be doing alright because "Benny's letting you live. That's something. He doesn't like anybody. Not even himself."

The night before our next turn in the boonies Timmy was able to use one of the senior NCO's Ham Radio gear to phone his mother back in New Orleans. I walked into the ComShack near the tail end of his call. He insisted that I talk to his mother. I assured her that her son was learning fast and that I was personally taking an interest in seeing that he was able to come home safely.

The next morning we were on a very standard patrol. We were going to make contact with some villagers who were friendly to us that had reported some NVA activity in our area.

Timmy was following all the rules I had taught him. He wasn't on the trails, he was walking carefully through the heavier brush. He stepped on a mine anyway. We all froze and began to carefully crawl to where he was. One leg was completely blown off and he was bleeding badly. I called to him to lie still. He didn't. He was screaming in pain and fear and he was trying frantically to locate his lower leg. He triggered another mine, this time with his torso. That killed him.

We carefully worked our way to his body without setting off any other mines. By that time a chopper with a medical team had landed nearby. All we were able to do was to get his entire body collected. The chopper team guys came and started to put Timmy into a body bag. I told them to stop. They looked at me in annoyance. That was as far as they went with their expression. I guess the look on my face suggested to them that silence was the safest course of action.

I put him into the bag myself. Slowly. Gently. Then, before transferring his torso to the bag, I took my canteen and a scrap of Timmy's field blouse. I washed his face and put his cap on. Then I handed his dog tags to the chopper crew. I told them "Thank you for that moment. Carry on."

I wrote to Timmy's family to tell them how sorry I was that their son had been killed. Later, once I was out and back in the world I stopped in to meet them and invite them to a show that I was playing there.

For a couple of weeks, in a brutal war zone, the presence of one young man made an impact on me that I doubt I have been able to describe. Just by being young and clean he drew me out of a very thick, hard shell that I had formed. By being an innocent he reminded me that there was still some innocence left in the world.

This memorial day I am not celebrating, I don't barbeque and carouse. I remember the kids like Timmy. I'll probably be on the phone with a couple of the guys I served with. We'll lie to each other and say how great things are. At least we know that we're lying. We don't buy our own bullshit anymore. We're all too old for that.

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