I HAD always thought of Jimmy as an exceptionally nice if simple man. Each time I’d seen him at my brother’s for Thanksgiving dinner, he had appeared to me to be an extremely even-tempered, quiet, person — one who measured his words and his movement so as not to waste anything at all on fancy.
He is possessed of a ponderousness of speech befitting the thickness of his lips and suitable to his stature, which was quite impressive. His eyes, like so many Americans descended of the original settlers, were cornflower blue and steadily fixed on something beyond their stare. His nose was the bulbous sort, more from heritage than environment. His hands I liked very much. They were big and wide, as naturally open as his expression.
Jimmy is as “big as his wife is small, both extremely so,” I was about to say, but stopped at Jimmy’s expression — which was as if he had something important to relay.
I had always thought Jimmy a nice, if simple, boy and not much more. That Thanksgiving when he got me alone he began:
“’Bout this time in my hometown, we’d be hunting,” he said. “I put down my gun when I come back from ‘Nam.”
Jimmy said he’d grown up a “simple Baptist boy” in a small town with two churches and a school. The family he’d come from were poor, working class and traditional. He knew — because his brother had told him — that he needed to get out of there if he was to get a college education.
And so Jimmy had enlisted in 1962 and gone to Vietnam for the first of two tours. He said he was embarrassed by what he’d seen some of his fellow soldiers do there.
“The pot was $3 for a big bag,” he said, his big hands surrounding some invisible amount. “There was heroin and coke, cheap and easy to get.”
But he was a Baptist boy, he said, and “never did anything to be ashamed of — sure saw a lot, saw a lot at 17.”
“Here I was from a little town in the South; I was sent to Arlington Cemetery to guard John Kennedy’s grave; there I was with General de Gaulle and all these big leaders. And then I’d be back on the mountaintop in Da Nang.
“They had body bag counts every night,” Jimmy said. “If you’d brought them in, they’d send you to Saigon, they’d give you money — you’d have a pocketful of money, the best hotels — then, next day, you’d be back in Da Nang on the same mountain top.
“I saw them make up photographs — move things around, so they’d look better. They said ‘Charlie’ did that, but we did that too — we’re still doing that now in Bosnia,” he said.
“Body bags? Who’s the Viet Cong?” I asked.
“Didn’t matter — just a body bag — just a number,” he said.
And so, Jimmy — who baked sweet potato pies and made eggnog pound cake for Thanksgiving dinner at my brother’s house, who said grace every year because he still believed in a gracious God, he whom I had known as a nice and kind young man and was now a man of almost 50 — had led a heroic life, perhaps the more so for not having told us.
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