TWO PASSING STRANGERS

TWO PASSING STRANGERS

In the back of the deuce-and-a-half mud-covered truck sat twelve members of Able Company, identified by the screaming eagle on their sleeve as members of the 82nd Airborne. They were tired, dirty, hungry, and in need of a shower. One of the weary, dirty GIs was Stanley Dombrowski, a draftee from the south side of Chicago. This group was returning from a ten-day skirmish with Charlie in a delta rice paddy. Stan was not only coming back from the battle but also from his yearlong tour of duty in Vietnam. He had just survived the last of many battles in the past year. They had been lying in leech-infested rice paddies, with the sword grass as their only cover, trying to take shelter from VC snipers in every tree, whose sole purpose was to kill as many Americans as possible—surviving ten days of relentless rain and cloud cover that kept the gunships grounded, preventing them from providing the firepower needed to neutralize the VC forces and allow the squad to leave. The sun was shining again, and the arrival of helicopter gunships neutralized the VC, allowing the exhausted troops to leave the battlefield and return to base camp. Compared to what they had been through, the hot, bumpy ride in the truck was just an inconvenience they had to endure to get back home.

Stan was eagerly anticipating a shower and a meal other than the chicken ala king MREs he had lived on during the battle. His return would also allow him to retrieve the letter he had written to his mother and left at the base camp to be sent to her if he was killed in action. Looking back, he found it hard to believe he had survived a year in this hellhole of a country.

As Stan dismounted from the truck and headed to the barracks, he passed the fresh troops assigned to relieve Able Company on the front lines. As they went by, Stan stopped one of the fresh-faced troops to ask if he had a cigarette. The name stenciled on the individual’s blouse identified him as Rodger Brown, who had been drafted shortly after graduating from college. Rodger reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of Camels, and offered one to Stan. While lighting it for him, he asked Stan, “What is it like up there?”

Stan paused to think about what I should tell him: he would constantly be wet from either the rain, walking, or lying in rice paddies with temperatures in the nineties and humidity the same. The little sleep he gets will be under a tree wrapped in his poncho. He may lie next to his best friend, who has a bullet in his back and is crying out for a medic, or even worse, he's crying out for his mother, knowing his time in Vietnam is ending. If you tell him about the villages he will enter and where he and his squad will assume all the women and children are members of Charlie’s family, you will burn their thatch houses down. You will immunize yourself from even caring about the dead women and children lying among the dead water buffalo. You will be constantly hungry and thirsty, and will look forward to the quiet breaks between battles. Or do you tell him it is hard to describe and wish him luck?

Here are two people who didn't know each other before, heading in different directions. One is going back to the south side of Chicago, where he faces just as high a risk of being killed by a gang member as by a sniper from Charlie. He will return to a place that will see him as a baby killer and likely turn to alcohol to try to forget his experiences in Vietnam. He and the protesters in the street will question whether spending a year fighting for "his country" really benefited him. Is the path Stan is taking now any better than the one Rodger is about to start?

The other, Rodger, had left the cornfields of Nebraska to go to college and major in agronomy so he could return to the farm he had spent his childhood on, with the hope of continuing the family name. He is now preparing to board a muddy truck with many others who question why they are doing so. Will taking a year out of their lives to destroy the farms and villages of people he does not know help him in his goal to return and continue growing the farm? How does he feel about being advised to write a letter to his family to leave with base camp, to be sent if he does not return? How does he explain to his father that receiving this letter could mean the end of the family’s ability to run the farm? As an educated man, Rodger remembers it was Cicero who noted that, in peace, sons bury fathers; in war, fathers bury sons. Rodger can only hope the latter is not true.

Thus, two strangers have met in a country unfamiliar to both of them. They are merely passing through and heading in different directions on a journey that could shape the future of both Stan and Rodger. One is bound for an uncertain future on the streets of South Side Chicago, and the other to an uncertain future in the rice paddies of Vietnam. It is hoped that in a year, Rodger will have the same chance encounter with a fresh-faced GI passing in the opposite direction, the same one he once took. He will seize the opportunity to bum a cigarette and wish him “good luck, and keep your head down.”

However, not all ended well for either. Rodger died defending a hill identified as H946, a meaningless piece of high ground that was immediately abandoned after a brief encounter with the Cong. Stanley was killed in a drive-by shooting while sitting on the stoop of his house, eating an ice cream cone with his six-year-old daughter.