Jason Murray
May, 2012

At the End, A Single Tear 

On August 18, 1984 a few months after I graduated from high school William Stafford wrote:

“Twenty years ago or so it began to dawn on me how weak and fallible people are, how habits and limited environments had fostered institutionalized smugness and vainglory:  when saber toothed tigers died out bravery began to be possible;  lack of association with superior sensibilities allows the assumption that we apprehend all that is around us;  success at customary activities enables us to assume that we are in control of anything we put our minds to.  This mirror that we admire will shatter if touched by any real rocks around us.” 

Twenty years before Stafford wrote about saber toothed tigers and superior sensibilities my father in law, a marine, left for Vietnam for the first time.  He had already stood on the beach at Guantanamo bay, Cuba and attended a state dinner with Marcos and his famous wife.  Three days after marrying my mother in law Christine in a Quonset hut at Camp Pendleton he shipped out.  Hit in the face with shrapnel he was shipped home and awarded his first Purple Heart.  But Stevenmichael, or Steve as he asked me to call him, was a Marine and he went back to Vietnam.  This time a land mine got him but the field hospital was able to not only save his life but save his leg, putting him back together unlike the egg that fell off the wall.  Again the Marines awarded him a purple heart. 

Steve knew how to be a Marine and went back to work, walking with a limp now.  His duty took him and his family to Philadelphia, where my wife was born, and when he was shipped to Okinawa his wife and two children ended up back in Christine’s home town of Portland.  My wife Lisa was about 5 at the time and she remembers seeing her dad rarely.  Duty in Okinawa drew to a close and Steve came home to a new home to be with his family and was assigned to the Portland, downtown branch of the Marines.  

Little did Steve, or pretty much anyone else for that matter, know but his time in Vietnam had not only cost him his knee, and left him with a limp but during his deployment  to Cambodia on missions kept secret from the American public at the time his exposure to Agent Orange was going to change his life.  

        By the time I met my wife, Steve was already walking on a cane, taking twice daily insulin shots due to his diabetes, and had survived a small battle with a benign form of colon cancer.  As I got to know him I began to see the pain he lived with every day.  His knee caused him great pain, his back bothered him and he was beginning to get neuropathy in his feet.  While the source of some of his pain, the damaged leg, was obvious what he didn’t know at the time was that the diabetes, the neuropathy, the struggle with his blood pressure, and even the benign form of cancer they removed from his colon were all the responsibility of the defoliant, Agent Orange.  

    Vietnam was damned from the very start.  A people’s struggle against an indifferent government dictated by colonial sensibilities and a Catholic agenda supporting a very few wealthy people over the larger masses of undereducated agrarian society across the country.  Elections didn’t go well for the ruling party and civil war broke out with the Northern more agrarian part of the country fighting for a communist, populist solution and the South more urbanized part of the country trying to keep the status quo.

The United States had come out triumphant in World War two and most of its citizens didn’t feel the effects of the conflict in Korea.  Our prosperity led us to believe that the safety and security we had garnered in the middle of the twentieth century was permanent and lasting.  We had firmly defeated the Nazis and now had to turn our attention elsewhere to fill our need for an outward foe.  Communism, a growing spectre since shortly after the end of World War One, had expanded from Russia to China, North Korea, Eastern Europe, and finally to Cuba.  The Cuban Missile Crisis just seemed to confirm the threat and with Vietnam we saw a problem that our “superior sensibilities” convinced us we could deal with.  

Into this picture came people like Steve.  Primarily our poorest citizens, mostly minorities, who joined up and were sent overseas.  Steve had no other future.  When he was only five his mother died of heart failure.  Joe Gastelum, Steve’s father, took him down into Mexico and left him with distant relatives.  While the rest of America was moving to suburban communities with cul de sacs and two car garages, eating wonder bread and American Cheese, Steve was working his way back into the United States, and back to the few members of his family who cared what happened to him.  As a child Steve went to school, worked on a farm, and lived in a dirt floor shed burying his peanut butter so that the other kids wouldn’t steal it.  

    The fifties and the early sixties saw a migration of middle class whites to the suburbs.  Modern communities were born centered around the ranch home.  The modern home came with automatic dishwashers and attached garages.  Fences surrounded perfect yards.  A television went into every living room and the world was brought into our homes.  The sabre toothed tiger was gone and we had the freedom to be brave. As Vietnam grew into a larger and larger war the images began to filter back to us in the United States.  The wall was broken down and many Americans saw, for the first time, the gruesome reality of war.  

    For Steve the fifties wasn’t filled with suburban communities and automatic dishwashers.  There was no television set in Steve’s living room.  Steve spent his youth not watching Howdie Doodie but riding freight trains to rodeos and fighting and getting into trouble. While the rest of America began to see everything as easy and our success as guaranteed, Steve and others like him found in the military an escape from a road with no turns and no choices other than back breaking work or crime.  While most of America watched the first images of Vietnam come through on their televisions Steve saw the war first hand.  As men and women in the suburbs used a finger to turn on the TV and change the channel, Steve used a finger to kill the “enemy.”  An unseen people in “black pajamas” who were shooting at him.  

    The sixties and early seventies were a time of awakening for America.  The rocks around had broken the mirror with which we admired ourselves.  We saw a President shot in the middle of the day sitting next to his wife and waving to the crowd, and thanks to television the terrible moment was seen in every living room. Vietnam was next, appearing on our television sets in all its terrible imagery.  The world had changed for America.  The horrors that oceans had separated us from came home.  We learned that our government lied.  We learned that our President committed crimes.  And Steve came home. Steve came home to a world that didn’t want him.  To the two children born in his absence. To a family he wasn’t taught how to love.  We taught Steve how to march, then we taught him how to fire a gun, then we taught him how to kill.  But no-one ever taught him how to love.  

America had changed during his absence.  Steve had been changed during his absence.  He left for Vietnam young and whole.  He came back with pain and a limp, much older than the thirty years that he had so recently turned.  He eventually retired from the Marines having attained all but one rank that an enlisted man can attain.  His medals were impressive but they went into his foot locker.  His uniforms were immaculate but they were hung in his closet and stored away only to be worn again after he died.  He never found that civilian job he always thought he’d get.  He never finished the schooling he started after he retired.  He worked on his yard, and tried to be a dad and a husband.  

Steve grew sicker throughout his life struggling with his diabetes and never quite managing to stick to his diet.  His heart grew weaker, his knee troubled him more and more, the inch or so in length that leg had lost to the mine made his back hurt and made him walk with a cane.  In 2005, just a few days after his grandson Jack turned two, Steve went to the emergency room at the VA hospital way up on the hill over Portland.  While alone in the room with his daughter Steve had the first of several strokes and suffered two heart attacks.  The doctors again saved him as they had so heroically in Vietnam after he stepped on that land mine but while he remained alive and breathing he wouldn’t regain consciousness for over a week.  He eventually came back but had lost most of the use of his legs and had trouble talking.  The next several months were spent in two nursing homes eventually coming home confined to a wheelchair.  He lived a progressively more disabled life as his sight slipped away and his hands and legs became more and more useless.  He tried to stay in the middle of things but the failure of his kidneys had him at the hospital for exhausting dialysis three days a week eliminating the possibility for travel and for living even a reasonably normal life.  Two years ago we were all informed that he had contracted a form of lung cancer that had already moved to his liver.  His health was already too far gone for any concerted effort to rid him of his cancer and his death sentence was pronounced.

On a rainy spring morning, April seventeenth, 2012, with a single tear running down his face Steve finally passed from this life in another emergency room, surrounded by doctors, his loved ones either in another room or hurrying down to the hospital.   A few days later I visited Steve for the last time.  He was dressed again in his Marine Dress Blues, lying in a fancy box that was draped with the American flag.  As I sat alone with Steve in that tastefully furnished room, just me and the fancy box Steve lay in, I thought; what was he crying about at the end.  

Stafford, William.  Every War Has Two Losers.  Edited by Kim Stafford.  Milkweed Editions.  Minneapolis, Minnesota.  2003. Print.