A Reminiscence in Isolation
For George on Memorial Day
I have thought a lot about George lately, one of my ghosts from a past that has been lucky enough to span decades. Luckily, George has never been a triggered recollection, just a benign spectral from my misdirected youth. For now, just call him George, though his full name and rank are etched in black granite in Constitution Gardens in Washington, DC, on Panel 26E, Line 48.
A George reminiscence might show up anytime, but on Memorial Day weekend, count on it, with self-isolation rock the perfect soundtrack. I was listening to Buffalo Springfield, the Stones and Creedence last week from a favorite Vietnam era remix and there he was. Ageless, innocent, 19-years old.
Our lifelines barely crossed, only once as a matter of fact, in the summer of 1965. We were the essence of "bottom-rung", both stuck in McDonald's hell, slogging out our last summer at minimum wage before we had to take LBJ’s draft seriously. Neither of us were Fortunate Sons, just navigating the grinds of adolescence, topped off by the daily preoccupations and upheavals of a foreshadowed war in Vietnam.
Aside from the shared angst of uncertain futures we had virtually nothing in common. Hometown parents and teachers must have loved George, a reserved, hard-working math-club type, straight A student, from a no-frills Catholic family. Two years older, my life was his parallel universe in miniature. An unbridled college freshman, I was committed to not much more than the next weekend and a draft-deferred GPA at Louisiana Tech. Nevertheless, George looked up to me.
After hours of flipping burgers and scraping grease, our idle conversation occasionally touched on our tenuous prospects, like this one time. “Hey, George, thought about where you’re going to college?” A National Honor Society and California Scholarship Federation standout like George should be able to write his own ticket.
“I think I’m going to help my folks out, Gene, and join the Marines.” Scholarship or not, things were tight at home. George thought the extra bucks and the GI Bill would really help. The sky was the limit after that, and he was probably right.
“George, come on, man. You gotta be shitting me!” It was all I could come up with when I could take a breath. “George, do the math, that’s your thing. Nam’ll be history before you can even graduate. Get your ass in Berkeley, Notre Dame, wherever, for chrissake. Wait it out.”
With five or six siblings at home, George thought he'd done the math. it was just not that easy. What did I know anyway. A fortunate lifetime later I wish I would have pushed the issue, but given George’s circumstances, would it have made any difference? There was a gunny sergeant out there, somewhere, who was going to eat him alive, scholarship or no scholarship. But George was coming home.
It was two years later when I read of George’s death in a casualty count article below the fold of our local daily - “Killed in action from small-arms fire September 10 in Quang Tri, South Vietnam”. Dispassionate subscribers would also learn that George “served as a rifleman with an unknown unit...his remains were recovered.” Missing were the details that mattered: the impact on his family, shattered dreams, untapped potential. Barely nineteen, George had been in Vietnam for less than a month.
Years ago in an alternate reality, my generation was engulfed by a geopolitical pandemic, tracked not by epidemiologists but soulless militarists, much like today, and spread by the lies of American hubris. While the Vietnam War was nothing more than a nightly news distraction at first, over time it mutated into a more dominant strain, killing millions, most sharing a common betrayal. On the brink of cataclysm this Memorial Day, surviving random chaos is just as much of a crap shoot for billions today as it was for George in our war.
And the music, timeless.
We're still killing people today.... Palestine, the Philippines, etc.