What I Learned from the Viet Nam War

I have six brothers and sisters and I have found that all shared history stories are never the same story. Whether due to the age or gender of the teller, each era in a family's tale is always unique to the teller. This is the way I remember my world in the late 1960's, on a small farm in eastern Tennessee.

When I was about 8, around 1967, my family would watch the evening news just waiting for the lottery numbers to appear. Not like the lottery of today, where someone expects to make money from the numbers, but the lottery of disruption and possible death. I'm not sure I really understood what was happening when the date of October 15 came across the bottom of the screen, but I did understand my mother's sudden gasp of breath and silent tears coursing down her face. That number meant something bad to her, and my chronically angry father snapped off the TV and went back out to his shop without a word to my mom.

Soon after, my ashen-faced, eighteen-year-old brother Lyn came home and he and mom sequestered themselves in her bedroom. I was just a kid, but I knew something more horrible than usual was afoot.

Connecting the dots of childhood history is no easy task, and it is difficult to piece the snapshots of memory together into some sense of coherent placement. I am unsure how much time passed before it sunk in to my world that my favorite brother was going away, to a place on the other side of the planet. During this time, my parents fought often, and angrily, about something called the draft, with mom insisting on getting my brother out of the country. My father, who had been in the Navy during another war, declared it was my brother's duty to fight for his country and my mother believed this war was not a thing to which she was willing to sacrifice a child. I think this is the first time I understood about other countries, the possibility of people I knew dying, and of a place called Canada.