R in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam, 1970
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Michael Yandell in 2016:
"These memories have blurred in the time since my deployment. Nonetheless, taken together, the feeling they produce is grief. I know I am not who I thought I was. I am something different, something I never planned on being."
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The article that the above quotes are taken from was in my email this morning, Veterans Day 2020. How I wish that R, the man I met when we were just 17, the man who was drafted into the U.S. Army in spring of 1970 at age 20, the man who almost didn't go to Vietnam because he was against the war, the man who could not forgive himself for something he did while he was in Vietnam serving as a helicopter mechanic and felt that there was no one he could talk to about his experience; who suffered from alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental illness; who died having told no one the nature of what it was that haunted him down the years -- how I wish he could have talked with the veteran who wrote about his experience in the March 2016 article linked to in the above quote.
Every November 11 since I began blogging. I have posted something on Veterans Day. I've just revisited those posts:
This morning I received an email from PeaceTrees Vietnam and as a result two indigenous trees will be planted in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam, in honor of R. I am thinking of R's painting done after he suffered a brainstem stroke and was living in a VA Hospital, which was to be his home for the last 6 months of his life. He titled his painting "Plant My Heart."
"A soldier so ill looks at the sky pilot
Remembers the words
'Thou shalt not kill'"
On this Veterans Day, as on many before, I am sending love to all the living women and men whose lives are profoundly affected by war throughout the world. I used to think I was alone. I was never alone. We are never alone.
