I actually like the guy. I really do. In fact, to be honest, I was a little hurt when I never heard from him. Maybe he was annoyed over my silliness at the retirement party. I’d had a couple, but I vaguely remember doing an impression of a Prussian field marshal named, I think, von Hellmann.
Finally, Karl said, “There is a name on this wall of a man who was not killed in action. A man, who was, in fact, murdered.”
I did not reply to that startling statement.
Karl asked me, “How many men do you know on this wall?”
I stayed silent for a moment, then replied, “Too many.” I asked him, “How many guys do you know here?”
“The same. You had two tours of duty in Vietnam. Correct?”
“Correct. The ’68 tour, then again in ’72, but by that time, I was an MP, and most of my fighting was with drunken soldiers outside Bien Hoa Airbase.”
“But the first time… you were a frontline infantryman… You saw a good deal of combat. Did you enjoy it?”
This is the kind of question that only combat veterans could understand. It occurred to me that in all the years I’ve known Karl, we never spoke much about our combat experiences. This is not unusual. I looked at him and said, “It was the ultimate high. The first few times. Then… I became used to it, accepted it as the norm… then, in the last few months before I went home, I got very paranoid, like they were trying to kill me personally, like they weren’t going to let me go home. I don’t think I slept the last two months in-country.” We made eye contact.
Karl nodded. “That was my experience as well.” He stepped closer to the Wall, focusing on individual names. “We were young then, Paul. These men are forever young.” He touched one of the names. “I knew this man.”
Hellmann seemed unusually pensive, almost morose. I guess it had something to do with where we were, the season, the twilight and all that. I wasn’t particularly chipper myself.
He took out a gold cigarette case and matching lighter. “Would you like one?”
“No, thanks. You just had one.”
He ignored me, the way smokers do, and lit up another.
Karl Gustav Hellmann. I didn’t know much about his personal life, but I knew that he grew up in the ruins of postwar Germany. I’ve known a few other German-American soldiers over the years, and they were mostly officers, and mostly retired by now. The usual biography of these galvanized Yankees was that they were fatherless or orphaned, and they did chores for the American Army of Occupation to survive. At eighteen, they enlisted in the U.S. Army at some military post in Germany, as a way out of the squalor of the defeated nation. There were a good number of such men in the army once, and Karl was probably one of the last.
I wasn’t sure how much of this specific biography applied to Karl Hellmann, but he must be very close to mandatory retirement, unless there was a general’s star in his immediate future, in which case he could stay on. I had the thought that this meeting had something to do with that.
He said to me, or maybe to himself, “It’s been a long time. Yet sometimes it seems like yesterday.” He looked at the Wall, then at me. “Do you agree?”
“Yes, 1968 is as clear as a slide show, a progression of bright silent images, frozen in time…” We looked at each other, and he nodded.
So, where was this headed?
It helps to know where it started. As I mentioned, I’m Boston Irish, South, which means working-class. My father was a World War II vet, like everybody else’s father in that place and time. He did three years in the army infantry, came home, married, had three sons, and worked thirty years for the City of Boston, maintaining municipal buses. He once admitted to me that this job was not as exciting as the Normandy invasion, but the hours were better.
Not too long after my eighteenth birthday, I received my draft notice. I called Harvard regarding a spot in their freshman class, and a student deferment, but they pointed out, rightly, that I’d never applied. Same with Boston University, and even Boston College, where a lot of my coreligionists had found asylum from the draft.
So, I packed an overnight bag, Dad shook my hand, my younger brothers thought I was cool, Mom cried, and off I went by troop train to Fort Hadley, Georgia, for Basic Training and Advanced Infantry Training. For some idiotic reason, I applied for and was accepted to Airborne School — that’s parachute training — at Fort Benning, also in Georgia. To complete my higher education in the field of killing, I applied for Special Forces Training, thinking maybe the war would run out before I ran out of crazy schools, but the army said, “Enough. You’re good to go, boy.” And soon after Airborne School, I found myself in a frontline infantry company in a place called Bong Son, which is not in California.
I glanced at Karl, knowing that we’d been over there at about the same time, having traveled very different roads to that war. But maybe not so different after all.
Karl said, “I thought it would be good if we met here.”
I didn’t reply.
After Vietnam, we both remained in the army, I think because the army wanted us, and no one else probably did. I became an MP and served a partial second tour in Vietnam. Over the years, I took advantage of the army college extension program and received a B.S. in Criminal Justice, then got into the Criminal Investigation Division, mostly because they wore civilian clothes.
I became what’s known as a warrant officer: a quasi-officer with no command responsibility, but with an important job, in this case, a homicide detective.
Karl took a slightly different and more genteel route, and went to a real college full-time on the army’s nickel, getting some half-assed degree in philosophy while taking four years of Reserve Officers Training, then re-entering active duty as a lieutenant.
At some point, our lives nearly touched in Vietnam, then converged at Falls Church. And here we were now, literally and figuratively in the twilight, no longer warriors, but middle-aged men looking at the dead of our generation spread out in front of us; 58,000 names carved into the black stone, and I suddenly saw these men as kids, carefully carving their names into trees, into school desks, into wooden fences. I realized that for every name in the granite, there was a matching name still carved somewhere in America. And these names, too, were carved in the hearts of their families, and in the heart of the nation.
We began walking, Karl and I, along the Wall, our breaths misting in the cold air. At the base of the wall were flowers, left by friends and family, and I recalled that the last time I’d been here, many years ago, someone had left a baseball glove, and when I saw it, before I knew what was happening, tears were rolling down my face.
In the early years of the memorial, there had been a lot of such things left at the Walclass="underline" photos, hats, toys, even favorite foods, like a box of Nabisco graham crackers, which I saw that time. Today, I noticed, there weren’t any personal items, just flowers, and a few folded notes stuck in the seams of the Wall.
The years have passed, the parents die, the wives move on, the brothers and sisters don’t forget, but they’ve already been here and don’t need to return. The dead, young as they were for the most part, didn’t leave many children, but the last time I was here, I met a daughter, a lady in her early twenties, who never knew her father. I never knew a daughter, so for about ten minutes, we filled a little of the emptiness in each other, the missing parts, then we went our separate ways.
For some reason, this made me think of Cynthia, of marriage, children, home and hearth, and all sorts of warm and fuzzy things. If Cynthia were here, I might have proposed marriage, but she wasn’t here, and I knew I’d be myself again by morning.