RECOLLECTION
Referring to the photograph and poem, Trust
©Copyright January 17, 2004 by Thurman P. Woodfork
Woody,
Them young bucks' green beanies remind me of some old coot that I know about a 100 lifetimes ago. To look like that again and to be able to have the ladies turn their heads and look at you with lust in their young eyes instead of asking if you need help across the street. Just don't seem right does it?
Guess it just proves that we really were young and invincible and could turn a ladies head every now and then. It was a time like no other in my life. A time when ordinary men did extraordinary deeds as a matter of course in a days work and would say and mean it when they said, "Ain't no big thing, you would do it too."
We didn't have a D-Day, North African Invasion or a Battle of the Bulge, all we had were places with names like Hue, Lang Vei, Pleiku, Idrang Valley, A Shau Valley and thousands of other places where pitched battles were fought with an enemy as determined and as ruthless as the Third Reich ever thought of being. We didn't make the newsreels with coverage by journalists who were real, we made the 6:00clock news with the likes of Dan Rather, Peter
Jennings, Ted Koppel and even Walter Cronkite, men who reported only what they wanted the nation to see and to know, men who spent their time in Saigon and got their info from the daily 5:00 o'clock Follies at MACV.
We fought and we died in dark jungles, on cold rainy foggy mountains, in rice paddies and on sand flats. We weren't heroes then and we aren't heroes today. Then we were young men doing the job we were sent to do and who were hated and despised for doing our job and for staying alive.
We aren't heroes today either, just some aging old soldiers who at one time made a difference in another world and another lifetime ago who think of those extraordinary men and women who didn't come home or who came home maimed and crippled for life and who did not know that Vietnam would again come back into their lives in the form of diseases for them and worse than that, the diseases would take their children as well. Envious of ourselves in some ways, I guess so, but even after spending my entire life in the military, I still don't know if it was worth the price we paid then and the price we have paid since then and continue to pay today.
Sometimes I envy those who didn't come home and I hope and pray that they are happy as they roam the hills with the Degar and know that they are free from the pettiness and silliness of this world that we live in. They are still young while I have grown old and grey and make a silent toast everyday when I hear that another of us left this world and family because of that war so long ago in another century and another place.
I seem to have gone way off the trail here Woody my friend, please accept my apologies for letting my self think of other times, places and men. I suppose that this is not the time nor the place to let these memories have rein.
This is a place of poetry that describes war and its effects on the participants and on the generations to follow, it is a place to reflect as you have done with your poem and your picture. As I said earlier, the picture reminds me of another time, place and men in a time when for a moment at least we were at peace with ourselves and the world and for that I again thank you.
JJ