Remembering Vietnam

Reading the special series for Veteran’s Day in my local newspaper brought up flashes of Vietnam. I cried as memories of those years swept over me.

In 1969 I was a teacher living in San Antonio, Texas. One evening Scotty, a former boyfriend from the University of Texas, showed up with three other guys, arms full of groceries, sleeping bags, and a Christmas tree. They had all been drafted and had just finished boot camp. He asked if they could stay with me these last few days before they shipped out. Without hesitation, I said, “Mi casa es su casa!”

My apartment was in an old three-story house in the university area. From their perspective, standing in my doorway, they saw a tiny, open-space, studio apartment. The bathroom on the left had the only interior door. The “kitchen” was a small fridge, stove, tiny counter, and sink on the same wall as the bathroom. A small table and two chairs were a few feet away at the other end of that wall in the dormer facing the street. Parallel with the kitchen was a broken-in couch and a tiny table beside it, facing the bed that was in the dormer on the side of the house. There was only a sheet-curtain tacked to the ceiling for privacy.

Despite the close quarters, we all got along like a box full of puppies. No strangers here! No one gave orders; everyone just seemed to know what to do.

Someone flipped through my vinyls and kept the music coming: Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Doors, Steppenwolf, the 5th Dimension, Cream … They put up their Christmas tree between the couch and my bed and decorated it with lights and joints while Scotty and I made stir-fry.

All these guys were medics– aka “conscientious objectors.” After dinner they practiced tying knots on my toes. And we talked about everything but the war as we listened to upbeat tunes.

One of them had made the well-worn leather belt he was wearing. It was a long strip of leather with holes on one end like an ordinary belt. But it had a “belt  buckle” made of contrasting leather rectangle decorated by a loop of brass beads and a skinny length of leather to tie it closed through the holes in the belt. When I admired it, he took it off and gave it to me.

They all wanted me to come with them; they knew I was also an activist against that war. But I was a poor teacher; I couldn’t afford to go on my own. I said I’d try to find a newspaper that would sponsor me as a field journalist! At midnight we listened on the radio to the marvelous Jimi Hendrix  improvisation of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The weekend was a sparkly blur of good food, good conversation, and so much laughter! I loved each of these guys as best friends! But I fell in love with the man who made the belt.

I never found a sponsor so I could join them. Two years later only two of these men returned: Scotty and one of those three friends — but not the man who made the belt…

As unbidden memories of that war wafted before me, I felt the pain again. Added to the unbelievable numbers of people killed in that war were the boyfriends and lovers of so many girls my age — like my cousin’s boyfriend since junior high, a helicopter pilot, and my new love, a medic.