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The Marine
On the eve of President Obama’s announcement of his
decision to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, my family is preparing a
memorial service for my nephew, a Marine. He wasn’t killed in Afghanistan or
Iraq although he died a proud Marine. The battlefield where he fell wasn’t in
Vietnam but that was where the conflict of his tortured soul began. He served
two tours of duty in Vietnam and came home a different man.
He was always quick to laugh and loved to pull practical
jokes on people and at times in the years after Vietnam he almost seemed like
the tall skinny kid I knew as a child. Although I was his uncle, he was a couple
years older than me and when my sister and her family came south for vacations
he and I would invariably get into trouble together. Not trouble like kids get
into today but the troubles of a simpler time such as eating so many green
apples that we got terrible stomach cramps or digging a cave on a creek bank
where the soft Carolina clay could have buried us, according to my Mom, had it
caved in.
Vietnam began a downward spiral in a life to be littered
with failed marriages, estranged family ties and alcoholism plus a debilitating
addiction to cough syrup. For awhile he worked for a defense contractor until
that company downsized and he lost his job; that was just another trauma from
which he would never recover.
He was brilliant with an IQ well above average and the
heights to which he could have soared were forever held back by a closet of
horrors locked within his mind. Horrors that came from a country far away where
some politicians decided it was necessary for him to be, as a matter of national
interest and their political self-interest.
He was in and out of Veterans Administration hospitals over
the years, but it took the VA almost 40 years to decide that he suffered from
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). By the time the VA came to this
conclusion he was just a worn out old man living alone in a small apartment on
the outskirts of Philadelphia. The PTSD diagnosis gave him a modest pension to
supplement his Social Security but it could never restore the boy who went to
Vietnam or the moments missed with his children and grandchildren or erase the
horrors brought home from that irrelevant war.
Over the last months of his life we talked almost daily on
the phone, sometimes for hours. We discussed politics and family but it was
family where he lingered most. The horrors of war or its aftermath never
diminished his love of his family. He would cry about the grandchildren he
hadn’t seen in years. We never ended a phone call without exchanging “love you.”
His wife Carmen was the love of his life and, although they
were separated, she talked to him almost daily by phone and ran errands for him
when he wasn’t able. When he didn’t answer the phone just before Thanksgiving,
Carmen went to check on him at his apartment. There was no response to her knock
so she called the police. When they opened the door he was laying on the floor
dead. There was no bullet or shrapnel wounds because the wounds that he suffered
were not physical and were inflicted decades ago on the mind of a proud young
Marine; wounds that over the years relentlessly ate away the fabric of his soul.
If this were a paper document you would be seeing tears on
this page, not just for my nephew and friend, but for the thousands of young
soldiers in, or on their way, to Afghanistan. How many of them will come home to
life in a downward spiral? How many of them will die alone far from a
battlefield but a victim of battle nonetheless? How many more tragedies and
sacrifices must be made before we say enough?
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