Following my first trip to Vietnam, I was honored with a tour of duty in Reno where I would notify mothers or wives whose Marines had been killed or maimed. My staff and I officiated when remains were returned, and again when they were buried. Later, we presented posthumous medals and helped with death benefits and financial matters. In many ways, it was tougher than combat.
When I made the death call in dress uniform at the front door, many gasped, "God damn this war." And more than one sighed, "God damn that (President) Johnson." But never did a spouse or parent curse me or the Marine Corps.
Typically, a mother my age or older would invite me in and, shamble — suddenly round-shouldered — across the living room to pick up a framed boot-camp photo of her Marine in dress blues. She would show it to me and say, "He was a good Marine."
One mother — in a living room with a crucifix filling a complete wall, and a large, framed embroidery on the adjoining wall that read, "Our family is one when all are home," — added "a . . . a . . . damn good Marine." All casualty assistance officers have soul-searing memories, but none as terrible as those the next of kin will keep forever. So here are just two anecdotes.
First, one summer evening, black-haired Gunnery Sergeant Lloyd Glenn, a burly Marine's Marine and hero of two wars, was driving us to a small California town in the official Marine-Corps-green sedan. When we found the block we were searching for, we knew kids would snap a wide-eyed look at us and scoot for their homes, crying, "The car's here. The car's here." But it was 9:30, and we hoped all children would be inside.
"Gunnie," I asked Glenn, "does it ever bother you to make these calls, and tear up their lives, when you and I have survived?"
Glenn was silent for so long I thought I'd overridden the threshold between an officer and an enlisted man. Just as it seemed he wouldn't answer, his gravelly voice rumbled against the dashboard.
“Major, you always gotta' say to yourself, 'Is this something I have to do?'. And if it is, you just do it."
Glenn's answer exemplifies why we call non-commissioned officers the backbone of the Marine Corps.
While Glenn was leading a patrol in enemy territory during the first winter of the Korean War, he stepped onto an anti-personnel mine. As in TV melodramas, he froze, and whispered huskily to his troops to retrace their last three steps exactly and drop face-down on the ground, with their helmeted heads toward him. In the silence, he deactivated the mine by trial and error, but made no error. It was something he had to do, and he just did it.
The second anecdote began on a cold, gray winter afternoon. Grizzly-haired, blue-eyed Sergeant Major Doyle Berry and I groped our way through a tunnel dug through the snow from the roadway to the front door of an igloo-looking house. We were to notify the Marine's mother about the death of her youngest son. But a short, wizened man with watery-blue eyes and sparse, white hair opened the door.
He said his wife was at work, so I had to inform him his son would not be coming home. I asked him to telephone his wife and tell her only to drive home before the blizzard worsened. He did, but he didn't offer us seats, so Berry and I stood, waiting to confront his wife before we made the hour-and-a-half trip back to Reno.
Eventually he rose, placed a fresh log in the fire place, and hobbled over to me. "You have a son?" he asked.
"Yes, I do."
"Why isn't he in this war? Why don't you have to make this sacrifice?"
"He's only 15. In due time he'll go."
And in due time my son, Fred, did go. Berry returned to Vietnam as a volunteer and met his son over there. And the four of us returned.
This doesn't erase one iota of that frail father's anguish about a son who would never, ever come home, nor should it. But it exemplifies the agony of loved ones who to this day suffer the same torment.
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