After the Flag Has Been Folded (29 page)

After that family crisis, Mama and Frank reconsidered their decision to live in Alaska. Deciding it was too far away, they returned to Washington, near Linda. Mama got a job working as a prison nurse in Shelton, and Frank opened up his own engineering business in Auburn.

Before the twins started school, Tim and I relocated to Pendleton, Oregon. It wasn't nearly so remote as Enterprise and put me a little closer to my family—now it was only a six-hour drive to Mama's, instead of eight.

Ashley's medical condition continued to improve. I continued to write. Lynn and Karen flew out for visits. Beth took the train (she's afraid of flying). Some summers, I would load the kids in the van and drive south again. Sometimes Tim went, sometimes I went alone with the kids.

When Rufe McCombs got ready to retire, Beth called and ask if I would write her mother's memoirs. I told Beth I didn't know a thing about writing a book, but Rufe insisted. I was in graduate school at Eastern Oregon University at the time, trying to update my teaching certificate. My professor, George Venn, assured me that I was up to the task. “I'll show you how,” he said. And he did.

Mercer University Press published
Benched: The Memoirs of Judge Rufe McCombs
in 1997, and in 1998 it was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year award.

It was during the summer of 1996, while I was in Georgia working on Rufe's book, that I began to search for the men who had served with my father. I only knew the names of two men—Sergeant Hank Thorne and Sergeant Erwin Naylor. I hadn't heard from either of them since 1966. Thirty years had passed since Daddy died. Yet, his death was still as raw as to me as if it had happened the day before yesterday.

F
INDING THE MEN WHO SERVED WITH MY FATHER MIGHT HAVE BEEN EASIER IF
I
HAD STARTED EARLIER.
But even if I'd tried as a teenager, it would've been a difficult task. Mama had long cut herself and us off from Daddy's Army buddies. She didn't stay in touch with Nita Thorne or Shirley Naylor or any of the other military wives she'd hung around with almost daily in Hawaii.

The Naylors invited us up to their place several times, but Mama never did take us to visit them. She and Shirley had been best friends when we lived in Hawaii. After Daddy died, we made a couple of trips to Alabama to visit the Thorne family, but not after Hank returned from Vietnam. Mama simply could not bear seeing other military wives with their husbands and kids. It reminded her of all that she was missing.

I finally tracked down John Osborne, the man who was serving as my father's commanding officer at the time of his death. Osborne had written the letter to Mama explaining Daddy's death in full detail. He had described Daddy as “a close and dear personal friend.”

My brother was the only family member who had spoken directly with Osborne following our father's death. Sometime during those teenage years when his angst over Daddy's death was reaching a fever pitch, Frank had called Captain Osborne. “It was right after I gradu
ated from Lyman Ward,” my brother told me. “Mama said that Dad's commanding officer had written her a letter sometime after Dad died. She didn't have his phone number, but she remembered that he lived in Kentucky.”

It took several phone calls before Frank connected with Osborne. “I told him I was David Spears's son and that I was trying to find out more information about my father and his last days. He was very nice, and he told me what he could remember, but I came away feeling frustrated. Like I had more questions than I did answers. It was definitely a feeling of being unsatisfied.”

After that, Frank never tried to find out anything more about our father's death or his last days in Vietnam.

Unlike me, Frank has never felt that Daddy died in vain.

“Dad knew exactly what he was doing,” he said. “He knew he was fighting in Vietnam for all the right reasons. He was fighting to make people free, but the people of America didn't think we needed to be there, and they were too damn self-centered to care about our fathers. That's why the Vietnam veterans came home to empty airports or to people spitting on them. There were several times I wanted to go over there and kill every North Vietnamese I could find.”

Frank's eldest son is named after our father, and like the grandfather he never knew, my nephew is a military man who was trained at Fort Benning, Georgia. Frank's not troubled that his son volunteered to serve. “I'm proud to have my son carry my father's name. And if being a soldier costs him his life, I'll be proud of that, too. And I make damn sure he knows it.

“At least now people are giving soldiers respect for what they and their families have sacrificed,” he said. “The only respect Dad ever got was from the other soldiers at the time. Soldiers always respect each other because they know why they are doing what they do.”

Frank remembers that during our father's funeral procession, older gentlemen alongside the roadways paused from their work to salute
Daddy's hearse. “They were probably World War II veterans,” Frank said. “As the funeral procession passed by, they stopped what they were doing on the sidewalks and in their lawns and solemnly saluted as Dad's hearse went by. But that was the total of the thanks given to him by strangers for the sacrifice he made in giving his life for his country.”

It's awfully sad, really, that even though my brother and I grew up in the same household, missing the same father, we never talked about Daddy or about our sorrows. I wish we could have, but the attitude of the day just didn't allow for such discussions, not even behind closed doors.

 

C
APTAIN
O
SBORNE DID NOT
seek out our family after he returned from his tour in Vietnam the way Sergeant Naylor had. He had his own set of troubles to deal with—a divorce on the horizon, a couple of kids of his own to tend to, and the recurring nightmares that plagued him.

I understand how the pressures of daily living and the grief over an unpopular war may have kept him from coming alongside our family, but the little girl in me wishes he'd been there to tell me tales of my daddy, to take me fishing in a boat the way Daddy might have. Or simply to have watched out for us and given us a safe shelter from time to time. Most of all, I've longed to hear a firsthand account of how my father died.

I found Captain Osborne via a letter he'd sent to Mama. It was one of the few items from Daddy that she'd held on to over the years. Dated September 1, 1966, the lined notebook paper it's written on has yellowed, and the young man who wrote it has lived long enough to see his dark hair turn white. Osborne recounts the story of my father's death and at the end extends an invitation:

Osborne included his phone number and the wish that his letter might enable Mama to “face the new life that you must now face.”

On a lark, I picked up the phone and punched in the 1966 phone number of Osborne's Russell Springs home. A young woman answered the phone and said she was Captain Osborne's daughter-in-law. She gave me his home address and phone number. Osborne is a practicing accountant, as well as a retired professor of economics at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, and I caught him in his office one afternoon, between clients.

Our first conversation was disjointed. Osborne asked what I wanted to know about my father. I was unprepared and he was short on time. I managed to obtain his e-mail address and we began corresponding.

I've never been sure how happy Osborne was to hear from me, but his reaction didn't surprise me. Why should he be willing to revisit a difficult time of his life just because I wanted some answers? Yet, as a daughter, I felt confused by his arm's-length approach to me.

From time to time, veterans I don't know will pick up the phone and call me about some article I've written about Vietnam and our family's experiences. Many times they tell me things they don't even tell their buddies. I like to think that by talking about our family's loss I've given permission to the veterans to talk freely about their heartaches and memories.

“There aren't too many women out there who are as interested in Vietnam as you are,” Willie Norman remarked to me over coffee at the Macon Road Denny's in Columbus, Georgia. Norman, a Vietnam veteran who served at An Khe during 1968, is just one of hundreds of veterans whom I've met because he read something I wrote.

I met Mayor Bob Poydasheff of Columbus in the same fashion. Poydasheff called me after one of my articles appeared in the
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.
He told me it had moved him deeply. We talked about his tours in Vietnam, and he told me a story about when he was running for mayor. “One woman wrote to the
Ledger
and said she didn't care at all about my military service, she had no intentions of voting for me,” Poydasheff recalled.

While it's true that military service shouldn't automatically qualify anyone for political office, I think Poydasheff was more frustrated over this woman's total disregard for his years of service to his country than he was about losing her vote. He said his tour of duty in Vietnam had taught him the skills he needed to be a city leader.

Why could veterans like Willie Norman and Bob Poydasheff feel perfectly at ease talking to me, a complete stranger, about Vietnam, while my father's commanding officer seemed reticent to discuss his experiences? I suspect he has a harder time because when he looks at me he sees my father's ghost. Osborne's reserve might have caused others to back away, but it drew me in. I accepted the invitation that he extended to Mama in his letter of 1966 and arrived on his Kentucky doorstep nearly thirty-six years to the day after my father died.

Osborne greeted me with a firm handshake. I commented on the sparkling bass boat, the color of merlot, that sat in the drive. It was the sort of boat Daddy would have loved. Osborne led Konnie, my youngest daughter, and me into his home office. Konnie had come along to videotape the interview so I could share it with Mama when I returned.

Osborne is a handsome man, big-boned and tall enough to make me feel petite. He has a fluff of white hair and a golfer's tan. This day he wore a blue polo shirt and khaki shorts. A bronzed elk, the outdoorsman's talisman, was perched atop the bookshelf. He sipped from a glass of iced tea as we talked. Osborne spoke with a Southern drawl as thick as sorghum.

I asked if he remembered writing the letters to Mama.

“I remember the first one because your Mama chewed my butt for it,” he said. “It was the first one I ever had to do, and I was torn all to pieces about it. Your dad and I had gotten really close.”

Osborne said rank and file doesn't mean a thing when you are sharing a tent in the midst of war, night after night after night. The two country boys had become tight.

“When Dave got killed, I had to write my first letter. I wound up having to write a bunch, but I don't know whether you knew it or not, but your daddy was the first one (from the battery) killed. So trying to sit down and write that letter out in the field, I just couldn't do it.”

The first sergeant noticed the struggle Osborne was having and suggested he just copy a form letter from a soldier's handbook. So that's what Osborne did. “I took the easy way out,” he said, chuckling. “But then your mom wrote and kinda chewed my butt and said she knew we were close and she expected more than that. So then I sat down at Duc Co, which was the next place we went after your dad got killed, and wrote her that letter.”

I reached over his desk and handed Captain Osborne the letter he wrote that day near a schoolyard in Duc Co. Silence settled around us as he read the words he'd written decades before:

Osborne paused and looked up at me; he said he'd nearly forgotten what he'd written. A battle injury he received that December after Daddy died had put him in a coma for forty-five days. As he continued reading the letter, Osborne commented that he'd lied to Mama. Daddy did not die peacefully in his sleep as he had initially reported. Nobody sleeps while fiery mortar sears through tender flesh.

“Your dad had been sound asleep,” he said. “But he did wake up. I lied about that. There was no sense at the time to talk about the suffering and wounds he had. It wouldn't accomplish anything. I hope you can forgive me that lie.”

I asked Osborne to tell me how much my father had suffered.

“At first a lot. But then we got him some pain medication and he was better.”

I wasn't surprised by his confession. I'd obtained a copy of my father's autopsy report, nearly a year after I'd made the official request for his personnel file. I carefully read through the Certificate of Death and the Record of Preparation and Disposition of Remains form signed by Bruce E. Means, the licensed embalmer from New Jersey who'd helped prepare Daddy's body for shipment. I took note of several things that differed from the stories we'd been told about Daddy's death. First was the time difference. Means's report stated it had taken Daddy at least an hour to die. The report listed cause of death as “shrapnel wound of the abdomen and chest.” Common sense told me that a person wouldn't sleep through such an event and that Daddy likely died from blood loss caused by his wounds.

Osborne continued: “It was just before daylight. We were all sound asleep. It was pitch-dark. It was rainy. Raining hard. It was during the monsoon season. I did not hear the round go off. You get so accustomed to the noise. We fired off what is called harassing and interdictory fire. One of the gun sections fired every fifteen to twenty minutes, all night long. It was just to harass the enemy and to keep them awake. Well, we learned to sleep through it, and I'm sure they did, too.

“This round went off and I wasn't even conscious of it. I was still asleep. But your dad started hollering, ‘Doc! Doc! Doc! I'm hit! I'm hit!' Well, I started to turn over and I felt a good pain and knew I was hit with something. I immediately grabbed my rifle, thinking there was somebody in the tent. We'd had that happen before. I shined the light around but there was nothing.