After the Flag Has Been Folded (33 page)

I
INDA REACHED INTO HER PURSE AND PULLED OUT TWO PHOTOS. ONE WAS A SNAPSHOT OF ALL OUR KIDS, TAKEN
the previous Christmas. Only Amy, Frank's oldest, was missing. Married and with a family of her own now, Amy wasn't able to make it to Mama's home in Shelton, Washington, where for the past decade we'd all gathered each year to celebrate the holidays.

Dave and Shelby Spears have a total of thirteen grandkids. Frank and his wife, Janet, were blessed with six—Amy, David, John, Jessica, Robert, and Rebecca. Tim and I have four. And Linda and her husband, Greg, have three—Mannie, Taylor, and Gabe.

The kids have all grown up hearing the stories about Papaw David. They know he went off to war during the Christmas season of 1965 and that he returned that next August in a shiny silver casket, as our family's, a hometown's, and the nation's military hero. In their own ways, the grandkids have each missed having Papaw David around. They are the new generation of freedom's children.

The price of freedom is extremely high, and it cannot be paid by one generation. It cuts across four, including a soldier's wife or girlfriend, siblings or children, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, in-laws and outlaws, comrades and friends. The last generation to mourn a hero is the grandchildren. After that the sacrifice is only remembered distantly.

The other snapshot my sister handed me was of Mama, Frank, Linda, and me.

“Hey, that's a good shot of the four of us,” I said.

“You're supposed to leave these somewhere over there,” she said.

“Where?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she answered. “But you'll know it when you see it.”

I put them inside my bag for safekeeping. This day, March 1, 2003, was just another overcast Saturday in Portland. My sister had driven two hours from her home in Westport, Washington, to Portland's International Airport, simply to bid me farewell on a journey she still could not believe I was making. “I could never do what you're doing,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Lots of reasons, but the twenty-five-hour plane flight is one of 'em,” she said. Linda's dark hair fell in layers around her shoulders as she laughed.

Linda has been graced with the dark skin and the dark eyes of Mama's Cherokee ancestors. All the kinfolk say she resembles Granny Ruth. Frank and I both have the blue eyes and the freckles our father had when he was young. The only resemblance Linda and I share is our smiles. People who remember Daddy best tell us our smiles are just like his. We both like hearing that.

The other thing Linda and I share isn't as noticeable, but we got it from Mama: our fear of flying. Mama won't get on a plane to save her life. And, honest to Pete, between 1978, the summer Elvis died, and 1994, I not only refused to fly, but the very thought of it made me sick to my stomach. I'd wake up in the middle of the night in near convulsions, just thinking about boarding a plane. Not that I was going anywhere, mind you. I was a stay-at-home mom to four kids. I could barely get to the bathroom alone, much less take a plane trip anywhere.

Now I fly more than ever. Mostly it's because this search has demanded it, but partly because it's a display of victory to me. A way to
demonstrate that my decisions in life are not ruled by fear. That doesn't mean I don't have fears, it just means that, like Mama, I've learned to press on in spite of them.

Still, even I had to admit, the prospect of a twenty-five-hour flight was terrifying, especially considering where I was headed—Vietnam.

On Sunday, March 2, a group of people from twenty-four states, the bulk of them the adult children of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War, departed Los Angeles's LAX for Vietnam. The goal? To return to the battlefields where our fathers died.

I didn't ask Linda to go with me. I knew better. In November 2002 I'd tried to get her to go with me to Washington, D.C., for the twentieth-anniversary ceremonies of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I even offered to help pay her way, but she said no. The recent sniper shootings around the D.C. area had contributed to her concerns about the trip. But mainly she was afraid of her own grief. “I'm afraid if I start crying, I might never stop,” she said.

I understand Linda's fears about the power of grief. But sometimes I wish my brother and sister would join me in this journey. I know in some ways it's a compliment. They think that I'm strong enough emotionally and spiritually to do the things that they shy away from, such as going to the Wall. But I think they sometimes fail to realize that I hurt every bit as much as they do.

Thankfully, God has sent others alongside me who understand that my grief is what compels me to do these things. Charlie Harootunian is such a man. I met Charlie, a Vietnam veteran, while I was in D.C. A volunteer with the National Parks Service, he performs his duties with unfailing devotion. He makes it a point to stay in contact with the families he meets at the Wall, and he has become a dear friend who constantly encourages me to find ways to keep my father's memory alive. When I complained to him about how lonely this journey is at times, Charlie reminded me that the past is too painful for my family, especially Mama. He encouraged me to give her more time to work through her grief. He also told me how
proud he was of me and that he knew Mama was, too. I draw my courage and strength from veterans like Charlie. These men and women enable me to pick up the razor blade and slice slowly through all the sorrow, to get at my father's marrow.

In 2002 I went to D.C. at the invitation of my friend Pauline Laurent, a Vietnam widow and author of the book
Grief Denied: A Vietnam Widow's Story
. Pauline had been instrumental in helping me obtain my father's personnel and death records. And she encouraged me to connect with Sons and Daughters in Touch, a national organization that seeks to bring together the adult children of American servicemen killed or missing in action as a result of the Vietnam War. At her urging, I joined SDIT.

On Wednesday, November 6, Terry McGregor walked into the lobby of Washington, D.C.'s Key Bridge Marriott, his hands stuffed into the pockets of a tan overcoat and a broad grin across his face, and welcomed me to town.

Previously, our only contact had been e-mails. Terry lives in Los Angeles and I live in Oregon, but we both belong to Sons and Daughters in Touch. Our fathers paid our dues to this exclusive club. Their names—Donald V. McGregor and David P. Spears—are just two of more than 58,000 etched in black granite and embedded in the earth at D.C.'s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We are children of the Wall.

Terry was six years old when his father was killed. Captain Donald McGregor, twenty-nine, was a military advisor assigned to the 1st Battalion, 51st Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. He was slain by sniper fire on August 13, 1963, near the village of An Hoa. He'd been in country six weeks and was on his first mission in the field. Captain McGregor left behind two other sons, Jerry, nine, and Charles, three, and his beloved bride, Leola, twenty-nine.

Terry told me about his family as we walked in darkness, searching with a flashlight for Panel 1 East, Line 26, and Panel 9 East, Line 71, scanning the Wall for our fathers' names. Terry's last memory of his
father is not of a sober father-to-young-son talk about war. He does not recall a lingering hug or tearful good-byes. Instead, what he remembers of those last moments is the timbre of his father's laughter and the buzzing motor of hair clippers. “I remember him standing on the sidewalk outside our little house in Idaho and someone was shearing his hair. I don't remember who it was, but they were shaving his head and the two of them were laughing, having a good time. That's my last memory of Dad.”

Other than my own siblings, Terry was the first person I met face-to-face whose father died in Vietnam. Meeting him was like finding a childhood pal after decades of separation, or finding out that you aren't the only green Martian on planet Earth. Terry and I share a history of similar sorrows because our fathers share a history as slain soldiers.

At Terry's urging, I'd signed up with the National Park Service to read my father's name for the commemorative service of the twentieth anniversary of the Wall. There had been only two other occasions at which all the names on the Wall were read—at the Wall's dedication and at the tenth anniversary.

It takes four days to read through all the names. Since both our fathers died in the early years, we were among the first readers scheduled. Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, introduced Terry on Thursday afternoon.

It was ten-thirty Thursday night when I approached the podium. Puddles of rain made the stage slippery, so I walked across it gingerly. Behind me the ground lights cast an eerie glow on the black surface. My father's name was almost directly behind my back. I'd asked Terry if I could say something besides my father's name. We'd discussed this matter at some length over dinner. He'd encouraged me to say whatever was on my heart.

Thanks to an elaborate sound system, the names of soldiers, dead and gone but not forgotten, reverberated throughout the grounds. I took a deep breath and began reading the list of thirty names before
me: James Kevin O'Leary, Richard Norman Payne, Thomas Frank Presby, Ronda Lee Raglin. I paused between each name. Finally, I came to Dad's name: “And my father—you were a hero to me long before Vietnam—David Paul Spears.”

When I walked off the stage, Terry wrapped me in a bear hug.

While we were in D.C., Terry bugged me constantly about joining Sons and Daughters in Touch on their journey to Vietnam. I knew about the trip from the SDIT newsletter. It had been in the planning/fund-raising stages for three years. But I couldn't imagine going. Where would I come up with the money? Besides, I didn't have much of a desire to go. Most of my life I'd harbored a deep-seated resentment against the Vietnamese. Weren't they the ones responsible for my father's death?

But something happened there in D.C. on Veterans Day that totally broke me. My friend Kathy Crisp Webb was with me when it happened.

A self-described “Daddy's girl,” Kathy was the second of four children born to Master Sergeant William “Bill” Crisp and his wife, Peggy Lou. Kathy was nine when her father was killed in action in Vietnam. Her sister, Linda, was twelve and her brothers, Billy and Mark, were six years old and twenty months. Like me, Kathy has vivid memories of her father.

She and I were talking about our fathers as we entered the east end of the memorial grounds. Despite the hard rains that fell earlier that morning, thousands of people were gathering for the afternoon ceremony. Up until that point, I had not collapsed in tears as Linda had feared she might if she'd been there. Oh, sure, I'd been emotional reading Daddy's name. And I'd teared up standing there in front of the Number 9 East Panel looking at my father's name. It felt great to finally be able to see Daddy eye-to-eye. Still, I had not experienced that overwhelming grief that frightened Linda away. But as Kathy and I passed under a maple tree dripping with gold, I looked off to my left and noticed a group of Vietnamese soldiers, dressed in
tan uniforms, holding flags. An American flag and a flag from the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN). When I saw those Vietnamese veterans standing in honor of their comrades-in-arms, our fathers, my spirit collapsed.

I cried for the entire day. Nothing I did could ebb the flow. Kathy tried her best to console me, but it wasn't consolation I needed. I wasn't weeping tears of anger. I was weeping over the humility and honor of those men, and for the great losses both our nations had suffered. Nothing, not even Senator John Kerry's tremendous speech that day, moved me nearly as much as that Vietnamese honor guard. I knew then that I would join Sons and Daughter in Touch on that journey to Vietnam.

 

T
HE DECISION TO GO
to Vietnam came at a great cost to me, personally and professionally, and to our family, financially and emotionally. At the time, I was working a full-time job as a reporter and columnist for a Washington newspaper. I enjoyed what I did, and it showed. I'd won numerous awards and had a good rapport with readers, many of whom wrote to tell me how much they looked forward to my weekly column.

But when I approached my boss about taking the trip to Vietnam and offered to write stories about the trip, he said, “I'm not interested in any stories about children returning to the battlefields where their fathers died, and I don't think our readers will be, either.”

I was stunned. I thought it was the cruelest thing anyone has ever said to me, bar none. It was callous, cold, and simply mean. I felt that way then; I feel the same way now.

My boss continued, “Your vacation is denied. If you make this trip to Vietnam, we will consider it job abandonment and that you have voluntarily resigned. Choose the job or choose the trip.”

My decision to give up a full-time job and half our family's annual income didn't trouble my husband one bit, even though we both knew I could not stay in eastern Oregon and expect to work as
a journalist at that level again. Tim didn't care about the money, or how the lack of it might hurt us with four kids in college. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “So what? Go. You have to go.”

And now he was here, beside me at Portland's International Airport, making sure my bags were properly tagged, my tickets and passport in hand. I knew he would love and miss me but that I had his blessings and his prayers. His love humbles me every single day.

As Tim and Linda hugged and kissed me good-bye, we all fought back tears. I knew they understood how frightened I really was, and not because of the long plane flight. A friend had once said that if the Vietnam War doesn't confuse you, it's because you don't understand all the issues. Our family had long considered Vietnam a terrifying place. For many families like ours, the country represented nothing but crushing grief and oppressive sorrows.