For all our veterans today – an excerpt from The Rose.
Grandpa’s Congressional Medal of Honor
That was the very day that Grandpa joined the marines, lying to the recruiter about his age. He never did go back home, but stayed at his uncle’s house until leaving for boot camp at Parris Island. Shortly after that, his entire platoon was sent to Vietnam only six months later.
Grandpa sighed as he remembered the whole incident with regret. He never saw his parents again. Both of them died in an auto accident a year later. Drunk as usual, his father ran head on into another car as they were coming home from a party. He remembered reading the letter from his uncle as he sat in a foxhole near Dai Do. His eyes filling with tears, he let the letter fall down into the mud of the foxhole and wept unashamedly. All around him the sounds of battle raged.
Suddenly, another soldier from his platoon splashed into the foxhole next to him and fired a pattern of bursts into the darkened jungle.
“They’re all around!” he said panicky. “The place is crawling with Charlie!”
Grandpa didn’t care. He continued to weep shamelessly. Nearby a mortar fell, knocking earth into the foxhole and shaking the ground with its deafening blast.
“Shit!” the other soldier said, shooting another couple of bursts out of the foxhole. “Shit! There’s VC all over! Come on! Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The other soldier grabbed his arm and started to pull him up, but as soon as he stood, a burst of machine gun fire nearly tore him in two. He crumpled back down into the mud of the foxhole. Another mortar blast landed nearby partially covering his body with earth. Grandpa sat there staring at him for a long moment, hearing the voices of the Vietcong officers giving orders to their men.
Enraged, he jumped up out of the foxhole screaming. He stood there all alone and sprayed the jungle with bullets from his M16 until the magazine was empty. Bullets buzzed, whined, and popped all around him, crackling through the air. A Vietcong soldier charged him with his bayonet, and Grandpa hit the bayonet up away from him with the butt of his empty M16 kicking the Vietcong soldier in the chest. Wrestling the rifle away from him, he plunged it deeply into the man’s abdomen. The Vietcong soldier screamed in agony.
Grandpa looked up and they were all around him, shooting and charging him with their bayonets, screaming and yelling. The night lit up with mortar blasts and bursts of light from muzzle fire. He screamed too as he parried off the Vietcong bayonets and fought with the enemy all by himself in frenzied hand-to-hand combat. Bullets and bayonets cut into his arms and legs, but none of them were debilitating or fatal. Blood was pouring into his eyes and it was difficult to see, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care if he lived or died.
Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity, he just stood there with dead Vietcong soldiers all around him in the darkened jungle. He was shaking all over and covered with blood, both from the Vietcong soldiers and his own. Slowly at first but then growing in a crescendo was a new sound, mixed in with the sounds of battle now further away. At first, he ignored it as he shook all over weeping, not sure which was blinding him more, tears or his own blood. But soon the cheering from the other marines echoed loudly in the jungle.
The captain walked up to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “Son,” he said, his voice full of awe. “That was the god-damnedest thing I ever saw in my life! In fact, that was the god-damnedest thing I ever heard of!”
The captain put his arm around him and gently guided him back to company headquarters as he continued to weep helplessly. “Come on son we got to get you to a medic,” he said as all around him the other marines cheered and whistled enthusiastically, gathering around him.
After a while, as Grandpa sat in the MASH unit recovering from his wounds, he realized what he did. He leaned over the side of the bed and threw up into a bedpan. Alarmed, the charge nurse called the physician, but Grandpa was fine. He was fine when he was discharged from the hospital five days later, and he was fine when the general pinned the Silver Star to his chest. He was even fine when President Nixon put the Congressional Medal of Honor over his head. He was fine – just fine. He just never got a chance to say good-bye to his mother or to hear his father say to him – just once – that he was a good boy and that he loved him and that he was proud of what he did.
Sadly, he fingered the Congressional Medal of Honor there on his chest while the president decorated the man next to him. He sighed as he stood there, and wished he could trade it all for just one good word from his father. Grandpa sighed again as he sat there at the wheel of the Rose. It was rough being sixteen – almost as rough as it was being fifty-five, he laughed to himself.
All of these thoughts, feelings, and images occurred in quick flashes. He already pondered those events adequately in the past, so there was no need to do so now. They were just long ago memories of an almost but not quite forgotten rebellious youth.
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