The flame thrower
Christopher Hitchens likes to point out he never misses a deadline, or a plane — despite his fondness for "strong waters" and his disinclination to wear a watch. But what of trains? I have arranged to meet him at London's Paddington Station at 10.45am and, according to my watch, that was two minutes ago.

(An account of a soldier coming home from the Vietnam War, 1971)

Chick Evens, still alive coming home from the Vietnam War, 1971, wasn't the first war hero to finally straggle back to St. Paul, Minnesota. He was just the one my father and mother bothered to tell me about, when we met him at the airport. It had been eight months since last he had been back through St. Paul. My father (Chick's uncle) discovering at the last minute that that afternoon his flight was coming in that we'd meet him, the airport being several miles away. I sat alone in the car, as my father went to find him.

He was not the first hero coming home from the war in Vietnam. There were several others I had read about in the paper, not sure if they were citizens of Minnesota to be sure of, but at least Chick was kin to us (and perhaps I was just interested in a member of my family being in the newspapers, I was seven years younger than he, being seventeen at the time).

Actually most of the heroes I read about were unscratched ones, and only the newspapers called them heroes, but my cousin was a real hero, with a Purple Heart, and Bronze Star, at least to me he was.

My other cousins, myself, and a dozen other family members, the ones who organized and put together the dinner for him when he left, all of us who hadn't gone to that war, and still were on hand to welcome him home, not with parades, because there wasn't any for any homecoming Vietnam Veterans, but to meet him at the airport, and call him by phone later on and say, "Welcome home..." You see Minnesota never intended to have a parade; maybe for the next war, or the one after that, but not for this one.

All of us back home, all we had to do was to get married, be female, or go to college by a specific date, and we'd simply end up out of the war, and organizing family hero-dinners. It's the way it was back then.

When I first saw him coming out of the airport depot, I loved seeing his Army patches near his shoulders, and war service strip on his forearm, and the many medal ribbons on his chest.

According to my father, who had been in the Air Force, but not in a war, nonetheless a soldier too (during the Korean War) had told me most boys in the armed services, had no idea where Europe was, or Korea, or Asia. And most likely, no one really knew were Vietnam was, and knew nothing about armies and being a soldier, let alone a real battle, or getting wounded, like cousin Evens. They, like Chick were snatched up by a system overnight and told in so many words: if you go to battle, to survive anyway you could, if you could. And I guess Chick was one of those survivors.

He told me Uncle Wally, a WWII, Veteran came back into what he believed would be a familiar world, the same one he left, but he only endured disruption-finding it wasn't as it used to be. Although Uncle Wally was a POW, and he got a parade, with a brass band to welcome him home, and a dinner to boot, after some years he readjusted to it all quite well.

So, according to me, cousin Chick was a hero walking across the street to our car, I was in the front seat, I got out, stood tall on the sidewalk, my heart beating a mile a minute. I can't remember at what point, or stage, or even moment, or exactly what action he entered this heroic state, but he was there.

In fact (in all of St. Paul, Minnesota anyhow) the ones that came back from the war, many came back with PTS, or limbs shot off, or other kinds of wounds, leg wounds, arm wounds, and so forth, came back worse than when they left, simply as italics (that is, words sloping to the right), which is why for many years he never rose higher than a simple roustabout; grabbing job after job.

After several more years, at thirty years old, perhaps a little older, something happened to him. Or perhaps it happened during the war, or his years in the Army, or those years before the Army, and the Army just helped it along, and we, in the family circle-all of us-started to notice it. Up to now, the hero part had faded, and he remained a bachelor, living here and there, not taking all them many baths, or visiting the barbershops as the Army made him do, getting a lot more drunk than he used to; doing some fighting, although the fighting stemmed from his drinking, out of this common stage, and somehow, after a few more passing years, he sobered up.

He had changed. Even we-his family members-saw this happen. It was like he woke up one day and said, "What the hell's going on here?" He had been like a damn mosquito, flying about a damn swamp for years. That was years ago of course, and I would, and now he is completely back home again, living as he was meant to live. And he has never flinched since.

No: 449 7-29-2009

See Dennis' web site: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com

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