A LOVE STORY 41 years later
As I wrote I realized I have been impacted, at a deep level, by the stories of Iraq and Nam vets. I have been seeking to better understand how the Nam experience effected Bruce and his buddies there.
I realized as well that a second piece was driving me. That first year and that first anniversary were about Bruce and me living different experiences, being apart and yet being connected. That is as true now for us as it was then. It is true for all of us. We are connected, though time and distance and experiences may separate us. We, the Veterans of government wars or family wars or brain tumor “wars” or battles of grief,may not understand that we can have connections because sometimes we feel so alien and alone and different. But we are connected.
Lastly I wanted to share a bit of history with you in honor of love and old hippies and friends across time.
Nov 9th 2009….
I was thinking today how Bruce and I had 36 anniversaries together before he died of a brain tumor in a 2005. This November 9 would have been our 41st anniversary.
This year it is easier than the last and easier than the year before that. Yet still I find myself slightly out of sync with the world. It is as if my heart is in a time capsule and the dates are shifting and swirling. Fragments of the past drift around me, blurry but still able to cause an ache of loss and poignancy
We married less than a year after we met. I was 18 and Bruce was 21. I look back at the pictures from that year and I see how young we were. Of course we thought we were mature and wise.
I am deeply glad we married that young as it gave us so many more years together. It gave us time to be together too before Bruce went oversees. “Oversees" - that sounds like such an innocuous term as if he were going to study in Europe or travel abroad.
Oversees meant Nam for our generation. Nam- a far off place where boys aged and where others traveled home in body bags. Bruce and I thought little of Nam in November of 167when we met. At least I didn’t. I thought about cruising the strip, high school football and meeting this cute college guy named Bruce. I saw the photos from Nam and heard the news stories but it seemed unreal, maybe too scary to really grasp.
Three months after we met, Bruce was drafted into the Army and Nam became a fear ever present in our lives. I watched the news with more intensity. I saw the pictures of young soldiers and worried. It was real for me in a way that it had not been up until then.
Bruce and I were married in Nov 1968. We settled at Fort Rucker military base in Alabama thinking, hoping, we would ride out his duty there. We spent our first New Years Eve walking the streets of New Orleans. On weekends we hiked the bayous of Alabama or the beaches on the Gulf. It sounds fun but it was done with a touch of desperation.
The army promised Bruce that he would never go to Nam, but we weren’t convinced. 1968 became 1969. Promises were like leaves on a tree that year. One good storm and you were blown away. In our case the storm was the election of President Nixon.
Nixon, the bombing of Cambodia, 543,000 troops in Nam, more than 33,000 American soldiers already dead, dark military cars pulling up to the homes of widows-to-be… and Bruce, my Bruce going to Nam.
The day Bruce got his orders to go to Nam is a day that stands clear and sharp and painful in my memory. It was Valentines Day 1969. We were living in this cute little converted garage in Enterprise Alabama, a few miles from the base.
I had wanted to make a special dinner for Bruce, but the best I could do on military pay was macaroni. I was about to add tuna fish to the pot when Bruce walked in the door. He was wearing his army uniform and carrying a bag of freshly caught shrimp.
He had bought the shrimp for $6.00 from a road side vendor. We couldn’t afford it with two weeks to the next pay day. I was angry at first but said nothing. I thought Bruce was bringing it as a Valentine's Day gift and that was sweet.
Bruce kissed me on the cheek and hugged me. Then he kissed me on the lips with an emotion and intensity I didn't quite understand. He still said nothing about what they had told him that day at the base.
We cooked the shrimp and sat down across from each other at the little table in the kitchen. . I can see him now, playing with the shrimp and macaroni, pushing the food around the plate. H e looked down and then up and then away again, avoiding my eyes.
He started to pick up his knife and fork and then laid them down beside his plate. He looked up at me and said “I'm being sent to Vietnam.”
There are no words to explain the feelings that gripped me as I looked at his face. He looked sad, fearful, worried and yet was trying to be brave for me. He also looked like he didn't quite comprehend what was going to happen next. Neither did I.
We never did eat the shrimp. Instead we stood up and clung to each other, me sobbing, Bruce crying. We went to bed and lay in each others arms saying little, holding tight.
The Army gave us a few weeks off before Bruce was to be deployed. We went back to Los Angeles and rented an apartment for a month and played house as if all was normal. A friend took this picture of us in that little pretend place and time. We looked happy for the camera, but inside we felt the calendar turning day by day.
At the end of our brief leave I took Bruce to the airport for his flight to Vietnam. I cried all the way home, running two stop lights through the tears. We had been married for a little over four months. We had aged years.
Bruce wrote me many letters from Nam and sent me pictures like this one of him in a barracks. We talked a couple of times when he had managed to get down to Saigon but the letters that were our link.
I kept all of his letters and read them over and over. He doused them with his cologne so I would smell them and remember him. Even now, 40 years later I can close my eyes and smell that scent. Part cologne, part Vietnam
The letters burned up in our house fire in 2004. A few scraps remain and I treasure these. The words are not always full sentences, the edges blackened by fire and smoke, but they impact me still.
Most of the photos he sent were also burned. Three or four remain including the one of his boots and hat, of his dog in Nam and of a cart and ox on the road by the base.
The photos touch an inexplicable emotion in me; something to do with realizing Bruce had a profound experience as a soldier in Nam that I will never fully understand.
I had glimpses of his life in Nam when we met for Rand R in Hawaii and then a second time in Hong Kong where we spent our first anniversary.
That first anniversary was one that we never anticipated. It was not the story book anniversary in some stateside hotel. Instead I had flown from LA and Bruce had flown from Vietnam to a place miles and cultures away from home. Instead of a joyous celebration, the young boy I had married walked into the hotel room a different person. All the gentle and loving and good things that Bruce was were still there, but there was something changed. The look in his eyes and his silences were from a world I could not comprehend.
The difference was more than the smell of Nam… jungle rot they called. It was more than the little bits of war stories cut short because he did not want me to know.
41 years later I think understand more about what Vietnam was like for Bruce and the millions of other men/boys that had been there. But that anniversary in I didn't understand and Bruce didn't want to share.
I felt it in him as he lay on the bed, looked in the mirror or walked around the streets of Hong Kong with me.
We tried to put aside our fears and just be there with each other. We shopped and had dinner on the floating restaurant boat where I took this picture. The food was flat out awful but I did not care. We were together.
We bought a stereo and had it shipped back home. hmmm “home” How alien that must have felt to Bruce who would in a few days go back to Nam. He liked to plan, though, for our future. The stereo was part of that.
We had an anniversary dinner on a rotating restaurant. I still remember the bottle of wine... Matuss. I remember, too, the man with no legs propped against the wall as we exited the restaurant. Bruce gave him some money but then we turned away trying to recapture our make-believe vacation.
We did all kinds of things that week that were not a part of my world back in America or Bruce's world in Vietnam. We spent days surrounding ourselves with an allusion of timelessness as if we could keep the rest of the world away from us. But in the end I would go back to America and he would go back to Vietnam for another few months.
Bruce continued to write me.
I came across one of those letters as I searched for photos for this story. I thought it was perfect for it talked about connections across time and space.
He wrote 40 years ago to me
“I love you honey. Sleep well tonight. Keep thinking of the good night kiss and when you fall asleep I will be right there beside you in bed. Think of me close to you, holding you in my arms and in your dreams I will pull you close and kiss away your tears.”
We are far apart still, this time from death but Bruce is close in my dreams just as your loved ones are there in your dreams. I like that.
I created this video to honor Bruce on our wedding anniversary a few years after he died. The photos used in this video are scratches and water stained from being burned in the house fire and soaked by the fire hoses and the rains that followed. I rescued a few photos from the charred, muddy remains of the house and placed them here in this video.