The next several years our country would be shocked and saddened to watch on television the assassinations of President JFK; Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I was a bit too young to understand beyond the horror that I saw in my mom's face as she sat on the floor in front of the t.v. It was the first time that I considered the world outside of our home to be unsafe, but wouldn't be the last by a long shot.
My brother, Bruce was nine years older than I. He was not very nice to me. In fact, he was seriously pretty abusive to me. I can't go there. No. I just can't and won't. However, he didn't really deserve to be killed in Vietnam, but he was. The war was heating up in 1965 and '66. He had thus been able to maintain a deferment as the sole support of our family. He went to college for a semester and realized it wasn't his forte. He sensed he would probably be drafted soon with his revised status as A-1; so he went out one day to various recruiting offices to try and discover which branch might be best for him. His draft notice from the Army was in the mailbox when he returned.
Off to Basic Training he went. He proposed to Barbara just before he left and gave her a diamond engagement ring. As he cleaned out his car trunk he gave me his John Lennon sun-glasses and his mood ring, then told me to get lost.
He came home on leave for Christmas with marching papers to Vietnam. One Sunday morning he sat down in Mom's swivel-rocker to shine his boots. Mom was standing in the kitchen a few feet away. He said to her: "Well, Mom...in about a year you should be a rich lady." She knew he was talking about death benefits and she scolded him. He said if it wasn't for Barbara he wouldn't mind going to fight for our country. He soon shipped out to An Khe, Vietnam, part of the central highlands region, as an Army ground troop.
The story is that after the first week or so he twisted his ankle. He had always had trouble with his ankles. He was put-on KP duty for six weeks so it could heal. They sent him back out into the field Monday night and he was killed Monday night, April 17th, 1967. Apparently he was helping a buddy cross a body of water. He'd always been a good swimmer. Our oldest brother, Clyde, made sure he learned at the YMCA as a boy. His buddies gun went off and shot him. We never knew where the bullet entry was. My Uncle Howard, Mom's brother, had to scold the soldiers who accompanied his body home as they had conflicting stories. He told them to decide on one to tell his mother. This was it.
To say this was a horrible time in my family's life is a major understatement. It began early one morning when the doorbell rang and a soldier dressed in a brown military uniform stood there trying to tell my mother that her son had been killed in Vietnam. She screamed at him to GO AWAY as she didn't believe it was true. She asked me to look at him and tell her what he looked like. I described the uniform. He asked her if there was someone else he might talk to. Mom told me to run down the street and get my Aunt Garnetta. I ran like the wind and caught my Aunt in her kitchen. I was breathless as I told her something had happened to Bruce, a man was at the house and mom wanted her to come right away and she did. Life stopped as my Aunt began making phone calls to relatives and friends while my mother just collapsed on the sofa and wailed.
Eventually, that evening, I was allowed to walk down the street to my best friends house. Signe answered the door and I told her Bruce was dead. She had no idea what to say so went into her dad's room where he was napping. He called me in and I told him. He took me in his arms and held me as I cried and cried and cried. I didn't see Signe again for months. I guess she was deemed too young to be exposed to such life tragedy. Too young indeed. I was 12. Bruce was 22. Our youngest brother, Gary, was 11 and he took it so hard that he would never recover from the loss.
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