THE CARPENTER bees buzz a few feet from our heads. A truck with modified mufflers drowns out conversation. Birdsong fills the trees. The front door opens and smacks shut. The porch swing squeaks back and forth, back and forth. And the dry erase marker squeaks across the whiteboard as we talk about it.
He answers questions he cannot hear.
But first, the photos.
“That’s my living room,” he said, pointing to the canvas tent inside a sandbag fence. “This is where I’d work nights, making ice cream,” he said, as we looked together at a counter lined with aluminum cans.
We look through Kodak moments in a faraway land during a politically charged war. Most of what he learned about the war came from the Shelbyville Times Gazettes that were mailed to him from home. The pictures of card games, comrades in fatigues huddled together outside their barracks – sometimes smiling, sometimes not – fail to paint the big picture.
It’s hard to see 110 degrees and the smothering humidity added by an afternoon rain. You don’t see walks through jungle vegetation so tall the sky was lost above, and so was their location. You don’t hear the chopper above or the splash of water against the Larc boat coming ashore with supplies.
Andrew Lane and his wife, Inez, were still newlyweds when it came; his bus ticket, he calls it. They were married a little more than a year when Andrew and other men with their tickets boarded a bus in Shelbyville, bound for Ft. McClellan in 1966. In 1967, he arrived in Vietnam as a member of the U.S. Army’s 625th outfit.
“People don’t wanna know about it. That’s why I don’t say anything unless someone asks first,” he said. “So many people will never know what we went through. They don’t know how to talk to you, so I don’t say anything.”
So he talks about those that know, those that experienced it with him. The names come up many times, as do their young faces in the photographs – James Donald Hester, Curtis Posey, and the others from Shelbyville that served together. We talk about terrain, supply boats, heat, sand, and little things that made their day seem a little normal while they lived in a foreign country and followed orders.
“If you want to know about Vietnam, I’m aware of what happened. I’ve already been through the experience firsthand. That’s one thing we learned, firsthand experience, not hearsay. People over here don’t understand it. It’s not good talk. It’s real. I’m not bragging. Everything I’ve been telling you is history,” he said.
Andrew and his comrades didn’t come home to parades and well wishes. But he’s thankful he came home. “Some didn’t,” he said, “but thank the good Lord I came back in one piece.”
He went home to his bride and back to the life that was paused, for the time he was a world away. They had two children, Melanie and Drew. Andrew had worked at, and retired from Eaton. Work, church, family – a quiet life with little talk of the time he was away.
And over the years his quiet life grew more and more quiet, thanks to the time he served his country. Today, he can’t hear at all.
Evidence of Andrew’s ongoing commitment to his country, waves from his front porch. Old Glory and a Vietnam veteran’s flag remind him of his time there. And he knows at all times, the freedoms we enjoy are not without work and sacrifice. “Someone’s gotta pay for it,” he said.
We’ve become almost numb to “freedom’s never free,” a flat cliche unless you or a loved one have stood in defense of our country in times of war and peace. You might say it falls on deaf ears, but not Andrew’s. He knows.
The living room wall stands in salute to his service. His dog tag, medals, draft notice, discharge papers, and uniformed portrait all remind him of another time. They too, are quiet and full of untold stories.
“I’ll show you what was with me the whole time,” he said, reaching for an old, worn King James Bible, then a second one that was a birthday gift from his sister in 1967 during his time of service. “I still read it every day.”
Holding out a vintage Kodak pocket camera, Andrew said, “This went with me everywhere too. It just fit in my ammo pocket, and I carried it everywhere.”
The piles of square photos prove it. They tell a story we didn’t want to hear. They are benign snapshots, color and black and white, of a place we didn’t want to be. But he went when called upon by his country.
I thought of all the questions I’ve never asked, of things I’ve taken for granted, and of freedoms I’ve enjoyed without considering the costs and sacrifices that secure them. I thought of the countless veterans I’ve walked past, from Vietnam and all wars, without knowing of their service. I couldn’t hide the tears.
I scribbled on the whiteboard, what I can never say loud enough. “I’m so sorry. Thank you for your service.”
“I did my job. I did my job,” Andrew said.
