FWIW - My Brother Dies

It’s been 20 years since my brother Tommy died. The anger is gone, but a vestige of bitterness remains. Especially now, with this country mired in Iraq.
You see, Tommy did two tours of ‘Nam’. He was only required to do one tour, but he cared so much about these people that he went back to do a second tour. It isn’t certain which tour resulted in his exposure to Agent Orange, the carcinogen that took his life in 1986.
What is definite is that his company was detailed to an area saturated with the defoliant. He wrote us about it; about how the chemical agent withered the flora almost right before your eyes. We, the people, sent 58 thousand, 300 plus of our youngest, best and brightest to fight and die in a wretched little backwater of a country that was no threat to the United States.
We invaded that little country based on a lie, cunningly disguised under the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”. And, just like in 2002, Congress cowardly shunned its constitutional mandate to accept accountability for war-making.
Of course, we remember that fateful day in 1975 as the ‘Government’ fell and U.S. helicopters valiantly attempted to airlift civilians off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. This time, who wants to guess how our ignominious retreat will be recorded for posterity?
Back to Tommy.
In 1977, then President Jimmy Carter issued a blanket amnesty for all young people who had left the country rather than serve in what they considered an immoral war. It (the amnesty) was intended to bind up the wounds to a nation done by a bitterly divisive military operation. Tommy was never particularly given to eloquence, but this one time he wrote a personal letter to President Carter. In that letter, he stated his opposition to such an amnesty, no matter how well-intentioned and framed, as Abraham Lincoln 100+ years earlier, “…with malice toward none…”. Tom wanted to return the medals he had earned in Viet Nam, feeling, as he said, “…betrayed”. Fortunately, Tommy’s C.O. had prevailed on him to not send the letter until he had ‘slept on it’. His C.O. made him realize that the medals he was awarded were in recognition of his own character, not related in any way, shape or form to the actions of others. Tommy had great respect for his superior and sent the letter to us, his family back here in the states. We were all proud of him as Mom read the letter to Dad, Grandma and me.
My own support for the war (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was craftily ushered through Congress by one of the most savvy politicians of our time, Lyndon Baines Johnson) had been strong at the start. But, revelation of the “Pentagon Papers”, Richard Nixon’s “Secret Plan to end the War in Southeast Asia”, The Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre all combined to cause me to lose all faith in our leadership in Washington.
The worst injustice, as I look back, was the shameful treatment of our Viet Nam veterans. Our nation shunned them, treated them like it had been their choice to embark on a fool’s mission. Ostracized from the moment they stepped once again on our nation’s soil, many never recuperated from the trauma of a war that made victims of survivors.
Tommy accepted all of that stoically, chose to remain in the service and made as much of a career of the military as he could.
He did make a career for himself, taking classes whenever possible and advancing as well as an enlistee could. Until January of 1986.
Just a few months short of his eligibility for 20-year retirement, Tommy started feeling ill. He lost his appetite, or if he did eat, he couldn’t keep it down. That’s what multiple myeloma does to you. It’s a really nasty form of cancer. It grows inside you for a number of years, slowly, quietly. Then, like a demon, it goes wild. It jumps through your system the way a tornado jumps through a quiet rural community. Always looking four-square solid, Tommy was a gaunt shell of himself by the time Mom and I got to San Antonio on another cold and windy day.
With Grandma and Dad gone, Mom and I had to put up a good, positive front (as we agreed) so as to keep him in good spirits. We stayed a few days spending hours at the Army Hospital when he was not under sedation. Mom would return a dozen times or more to be with him and reminisce about times in New York and later in Phoenix, when we had moved west. I confess now, I couldn’t handle seeing him drifting in and out of being lucid. I begged off making the plane trips, justifying it with having an increased work load. I’m sure Tommy knew.
Then, on a Saturday afternoon in August, the call came. It was Mom. “Tommy’s gone” was all she said.

Tomorrow: Desolation Highway, or “Gee, I wish I had written that song!”

Today is December 18, 2006; 762 days until the end of the Bush Administration.