Twenty years ago today I was marking
the day before as one day further away from a very deep hole....then
the phone rang. At the other end was the sister of someone who I had
shared that hole with for the previous ten years, and all she said
was, “Shorty's gone.” For those few seconds that it took to
process what she meant, so much flashed through my mind. It was
another turning point in my life of which there have been many. Safe
to say there is at least one book that could be written about those
ten years Shorty and I share the dark space, and quite another book
be written about these past twenty years. But without those ten
years, these past twenty would tell quite a different tale. We were
partners, and I will never leave him behind.
He is buried at Ft. Logan National
Cemetery. At 18 he joined the United States Army with one goal, to be
Airborne infantryman. From 1967-1973 he did three tours of duty in
Vietnam earning five Purple Hearts along with some other
miscellaneous medal. In all he gave this country 21 years of his life
wearing the Army uniform of this country. These few words say little
about who he was and what he could have been, had we had a little
more time. The true cost of war is immeasurable. I fucking hate war.
