Memorial Day has always been that weekend where I get to remember some old memories. In 1968, I had joined the Marines back in March on delayed enlistment and now it was time to go. So the whole family got up at maybe 3 am and made it to the Trailways bus station in Johnson City. My friends Grady and Jim showed up and we all waited for the appropriate time and I hugged and said goodbye and it was off to the Armed Forces Induction Center in Knoxville about 80 miles away on the bus in the early morning dark.
An exciting day of getting some physical tests and then going into that little wood paneled room and raising my right hand with a bunch of other guys and we were sworn in. They gave me the packet of orders for myself and three or four other guys and off we went to the airport and my first commercial flight on a DC-9 I think, to Charlestown SC. Some time late in the evening they collected us and put us on a bus and away we went to Parris Island. We rolled into the base at maybe midnight ... hard to remember and then a DI came on and did the classic yelling at all of us to get ourselves onto those yellow footprints.
Well, I got through it, hard as hell sometimes, but did it and was lucky that I ended up in a place where no orders to go to the war ever came and pretty soon I was checking out and going home at the end of 4 years. Those were some pretty good times in a lot of ways, I disliked big aspects of it and enjoyed the friendships and working with a lot of good people.
So in the middle of all of the Memorial Day sale car ads and furniture ads and such I have to also think about those guys that did go to the war and didn't make it back. One of my high school friends, John Harlan is one of those names on the Vietnam Wall.
John was a really good basketball player. A tall thin fellow, he played center and I guess I had thought that he would go on to play basketball for some college. We had a chemistry ( or physics ? ) class together I think. He was a year ahead of me. I knew he had been killed in Vietnam, but didn't know where and just recently stumbled onto what and where. Just a place near the Cambodian border, in the mountains and jungle with an understrength unit running into superior numbers and too much cover and confusion for American air power to save the day for 24 guys including John. John was 20 and recently married when he died. You were a great guy John and left a hole in the lives of many in Jonesboro. Till Valhalla John!
Life is so precious. I'm doing a lot more introspection and thinking in the last year since I lost Susan. Just trying to understand it all. I've heard her voice in the middle of the night .... she would wake me sometimes when she was getting sick and I recently have thought she was waking me again. It was pretty unsettling and left me unable to get back to sleep for quite a while. I miss you so much Honey.
