Dear Charlie

Dear Charlie,

It’s been 45 years since you peered over the rail of the top bunk before “lights out” and told me you were going “in country” in the morning. 

You were just a boy with a shaved head that night under the glaring light in your skivvies’; lightly muscled yet white as a porcelain vase.

We heard later your squad did not make it back.

I’ve thought of you often looking down at me from that bunk and how I could tell you didn’t want to go.

I think of you when I think of all the guys sloshing through the jungle exhausted just waiting for a bullet or booby trap.

I think of you when I remember reading the bulk of infantry sick calls in Nam were for immersion foot. Ya’ll’s feet stayed wet so much when you’d remove your socks the meat would come off with them.

I thought of you the night I got drunk with the Vet in the wheel chair and he told me he wished the explosion had killed him.

You see, a buddy and I joined the Navy because we were on the last draft and didn’t want to ground pound with an M16 for the “Man” who we knew was lying.

Students had died at Kent State. I’ve always felt like they should have received a medal.

There was a black and white movie when I was a kid about the Sullivan family in WW ll.  Six brothers from the same family died in the war. They passed a law after so nothing like that could happen again.

So I figure if you had a brother at least your family didn’t lose him or them too.

Sometimes I think of the farmers during the Civil War … just the small farmer; No slaves,  just him, his wife and kids trying to scratch a living out of the land with their bare hands … that day when the two soldiers showed up riding from across the field and you ended up riding off on the old mule never to return.

Sometimes I think of you when in my dreams I see the merchant in the tri-cornered hat and knee britches marching awkwardly out of town because even he knows the bite of taxes and the redcoats armed and glaring in the streets and bars.His store eventually bending to the gravity of age until the old porch collapsed and the boys broke out all the windows in their youthful ignorance.

I love you, Charlie and I’m sorry. I don’t think the day will ever come when boys and girls don’t have to go to war. I’m just grateful I can sit here this Memorial Day weekend and write this.

So I think of you now, Charlie … lying there beneath one of the thousands of white headstones with the small flags flapping like a bird's wings in the garden of our remembrance.

Can’t help but rue the price of freedom.

Can’t help but think of you when it’s time to go to work, teach my sons, kiss my wife’s forehead.

May our grief be a testament to your sacrifice? Might our remembrance include your family and friends? Might our hearts swell with pride when we stand in that voting booth? May we choose with profound ethic, reasoned thought and a hope for a future built upon the graves of all who have given the ultimate sacrifice?

“Thank you” seems so little to say, Charlie. So I’ll say it but promise you that I will live each breath trying to repay all of you and those who love you that still walk the earth and all those that will go again into the jungle and desert and wood.

God bless you, Charlie. God bless America.