I was in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War but I was not sent overseas before I had my spinal cord injury. Yet, it was getting to know my cousin’s spouse’s cousin for a few short years that made me understand why Veterans Day means sacrifice.
He and I met while we were both undergoing physical rehabilitation at a VA hospital in the northeast. My injury was from a diving accident. His was from 11 Viet Cong machine gun bullets. He lost an eye and a kidney, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. He was constantly in motion, too, but I believe today it was his way of trying to overcome, or maybe forget about, the physical pain he must have been feeling. I can’t say that we became close friends, and by the spring of 1969, we were both out of the VA and picking up the pieces of our lives.
Sometime in 1971, I heard through the family grapevine that he had passed away in his sleep. He couldn’t have been more than 23 or 24 when he died. My memory isn’t too good anymore but I seem to recall having some kind of physical ailment that prevented me from going to his funeral service. Maybe I just tell myself that was the reason, because I couldn’t deal with the sadness of his death.
Fast forward more than twenty years when I get a call at work from a guy we both went through physical rehabilitation with. He, too, was injured in Vietnam, and he’s just back from a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He tells me that my cousin’s spouse’s cousin’s name is not on the Memorial. “Can you get me in touch with his family?” he asks. I respond in the affirmative, call my cousin to retrieve a phone number, pass it along, and the mutual buddy is all set. Or so I thought. It turns out that it took him a few years of haggling with Department of Defense bureaucrats to approve placing his buddy’s name on the Memorial.
In 1995, I went on vacation to Washington, DC, and on a hot and humid summer night, my traveling companion carefully traced my cousin’s spouse’s cousin’s name from the Memorial.
The very next Veterans Day, I was chosen to give a presentation on the meaning of this one day each year to a group of high school students in New Jersey. They were talking it up pretty good as they streamed into the auditorium, I would say about 250 strong. I was fairly comfortable speaking to groups of people, having done so before, but never to high-energy teens. I didn’t know what to expect.
The school principal’s introduction of me calmed them down pretty good, probably because most were about to hear their first speech ever from a wheelchair user. I started out by telling them about my summer trip to the Memorial and decided to pass around the tracing of my cousin’s spouse’s cousin’s name so everyone could see it.
There was the most complete silence I have ever experienced over the next 20 to 25 minutes in that auditorium. While my presentation was about the services that our association provides to vets with disabilities, they learned through the simple act of viewing my Vietnam Memorial tracing that many who serve our nation so bravely do make the ultimate sacrifice.
On that Veterans Day in 1995, it was a Vietnam Memorial tracing that was “worth a thousand words.”
by Terry Moakley