My wife’s father passed away on March 22nd 2010.
On the day of his funeral, I was truly honored and humbled to be in the presence of the many fine men who served with him in Vietnam. Not just on the front lines, but behind them
While I do respect genuine conscientious objectors (probably a minority of those who made the claim), these are people who didn’t run and hide or use their family connections to effectively run and hide in an ill-gotten safe assignment.
Read American Warrior: A Combat Memoir of Vietnam (ISBN 978-0806528069) for a first-hand account, including several stories about Kimberly’s Dad.
Below are the words of my wife Kimberly, from her personal blog The Gav Menagerie:
* * *
I am a writer. I write to process, to record and to de-stress. My father was a writer too. I like to think that my love of writing is a gift from him, one of many he gave me throughout my life.
My father was a war veteran. A hero. He was a philosopher and an historian. He loved politics. He was an avid reader and a painter. He always had a good story to tell. He was a genealogist who researched our family tree back hundreds of years.
He also loved astronomy. With his telescope, he could identify all of the planets. When I was a young girl, he would wake me in the middle of the night sometimes so that he share an eclipse or meteor shower with me. I remember standing on the back step of our house in Clarksburg in my pajamas looking up at the sky with him one night as a comet blazed overhead.
“See Kim, see?” he said. “Isn’t that beautiful? You won’t see that again in your lifetime.”
I saw.
And even back then – at only about 7 years old – I knew why that moment was so spectacularly awesome in so many ways.
Thank you, Dad, for many, many things. You will be missed; you will be remembered. Because for the rest of my life, I will look up into the night sky and imagine you out there somewhere – chasing that comet.
