The Scum Also Rises
When I was in college, we occasionally talked about serious things, besides girls, weed, girls, beer, and g–. Um, let’s move on.
One guy lost his brother in Nam. I guess he was around 10 or so. He talked about the horrible fate that hit the family hard. Shortly after they received THE letter from the army, Life magazine did a story on the war with cringe-inducing photos that you couldn’t get out of your mind. One picture showed their deceased boy riding on a truck holding an IV bottle for a wounded soldier at his feet. Everybody got Life magazine in those days (the photography was brilliant and sharp. Seeing the picture was, as you can guess, good and bad.
Cut to the 90’s. Wife and I are visiting her friend out of state. While the women are running mouths in the kitchen, I open a coffee table book on “The Sixties” published by Life magazine. I’m looking at the gut-wrenching Nam pictures and suddenly it hits me.
This picture shows the college guy’s dead brother. How did I know? The guy said he sent a small rubber octopus in the mail and his brother put it in the netting of his helmet. I just stared, wide-eyed. My wife saw me and came in. “See this?” I said. “This guy had only days to live after this picture was taken.”
I had totally forgotten the guy’s story from the seventies, but Vietnam stuff is like that, even for civilians–you think some emotions have been buried, but they can rise again with sudden thunder.
(You might think you know the above song, but you don’t)