We thought about it at the time and then took it all for granted, but luck never lasts, be it good or bad. My family’s good luck ran out with Lawrence’s boy, Lee; his B-52 was shot down over Iran when Reagan carpet bombed that Goddamn miserable country. He ejected in time, but then spent thirteen months as a prisoner of the Ayatollah. My nephew broke both legs when he landed hard in the country outside Teheran and the sons of bitches threw him in a cell, kept him in solitary and didn’t bother to set either leg; Lee spent most of the years since then in a wheelchair.
But the worst of it, at least for me, came twenty seven years to the day after the cease fire in Vietnam was signed; that was the day my oldest son, Travis Jr., took a round through the head outside Potsdam, Germany. He was doing his duty, keeping the starving Russians from overrunning all of Europe; they saved Travis’s life-those Army surgeons had plenty of practice in the intervening years-but it’s been tough row to hoe since then. Travis is doing well now-even married to a nice girl and raising a little boy, but it’s been a long journey, that‘s all I‘ll say.
When I look at that little boy, especially when he’s playing on the floor with the GI Joe I got him last Christmas and I really hope there are no Vietnams in his future.
But I fear.
The End