This morning, my 93-year-old father, who is a veteran of the European theater in World War II, sent me an email that he was remembering “the 18 and 19 year old boys lying under all the little white crosses in France – those boys who were unlucky enough to be the right age at the wrong time — a time for war.”  He now lives alone on top a mountain in the far western part of the state, lost in his memories, and will have a frozen TV dinner tonight.

In Infantry Officer Candidate School decades ago, there was another candidate whose first name was Bill and whose last name was so close to mine alphabetically that we were bunk-mates for 26 weeks there and another 3 weeks in Paratrooper school.  By the time, we got to Special Forces training, we were both commissioned officers and could afford our own apartments, but even our apartments were close together.  We were like brothers.

In the highlands of Vietnam, the Vietcong would sometimes burrow into the ground, digging elaborate tunnels.  (There was a nickname for those soldiers tasked with flushing out the enemy, but it is now lost in the layers of my memory somewhere.)  The standard operating procedure was to first drop grenades into the tunnels, hoping for a frag-kill or a tunnel collapse.  Sometimes, a flamethrower was used, but the bounce-back of flames could be dangerous.  As the officer, Bill would usually wait on the surface to direct fire on any escaping enemy.  One day, an enemy solder suddenly popped out of an unseen tunnel and sprayed him with “a burst of six.”  It was the last thing that enemy solder ever did.  Fortunately, Bill survived but with shattered knees.

In 1990, he came to visit me in Texas.  As soon as I hugged him, I knew something was wrong.  On his third unhappy marriage and in pain from his wounds, he was “hollowed-out,” as he described it.  We sat on the shore of Lake Hubbard, remembered old buddies, and cried together.  A few years later, Bill ended his pain with a 9mm pistol, unfortunately transferring some small part of that pain to his loved ones.

It is good to remember those who died for us on the battlefield, but it is also good to remember that dying emotionally is different than dying physically.  I don’t know if it is better to die laying in the mud in some Godforsaken place or slowly dying from the inside-out over many decades.  At least, if you die laying in the mud, you never have a chance to hurt anybody else.

So, I will consume a large quantity of unhealthy food today and will also raise a beer to all those who died . . . and to all those civilians who are still dying slowly on the inside.