Welcome home bro

A little after seven Thursday evening I called my wife to tell her I would be home in  a couple of hours.  I had returned a trencher to a friend and was on my way home.  She told me I had two calls from a man back east wanting to talk to me about Viet Nam.  He had called earlier in the day.  She told him to call about seven because I should be home by then.  He called seven straight up and she told him that I wouldn’t be home for awhile yet.  He said he’d call Friday evening.

Last night as I was sitting down to supper the home phone rang.  It was seven p.m.  on the button and it was the fella from back east.  I was the first person he had talked to from our outfit in Nam.  It seems he was my replacement’s replacement.  I’d left in 1967 and he had arrived in country in 1968.

He put his wife on the phone so I could explain how to find and navigate my website so he could see the pictures and read the stories I had there about Viet Nam.  I told her to  email me and I’d return the email with a bunch of emails from other soldiers who had found me with the same questions and answers her husband had and for the same reasons.

Five minutes later he called back excited as, well, a puppy with two tails if you will.  “I’m on your website.  You’ve got pictures of me!”  It seems one of the guys who sent pictures to put up had two photos of the caller as a kid in Nam.

After supper I sat down and started forwarding emails.  I think there was fifteen, there abouts, plus or minus.  Some of them from guys who are hunting, some who have found,  and some from guys wanting a buddy statement to support a VA claim for PTSD.

Just before ten I called him back to see if he had gotten the emails.  He was reading them when I called.  We talked for awhile.  As I was ringing off I said, “welcome home bro.”

He just turned fifty nine.  I just turned sixty.  Our birthdays are one year and four days apart.  But what we share is landing in country as a kid and coming home as something else.  That something else is the kid part that never got the opportunity to de-kid the way all of our peers did.  The other part of the something else is the cynic adult that can be created in a concentrated adult class like you have in a war zone even if you’re not in combat.

The hiccup in the get up is that something else is only one component of the creature that is the veteran.  And it’s how all the other components interact with the something else that makes us, well, an us.  That aside, it’s family because first and foremost, we’re brothers.