[The following is one of many anonymous notes and letters found at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.]
Dear ‘Smitty,
Perhaps, now I can bury you; at least in my soul. Perhaps, now, I won’t again see you night after night when the war re-appears and we are once more amidst the myriad hells that Vietnam engulfed us in.
We crept ‘point’ together and we pulled ‘drag’ together. We lay crouched in cold mud and were drenched by monsoons. We sweated buckets and endured the heat of dry season. We burnt at least a thousand leeches off one another and went through a gallon of insect repellent a day that the bugs were irresistibly attracted to.
When you were hit, I was your medic all the way, and when I was blown 50 feet by the mortar, you were there first. When I was shaking with malaria, you wiped my brow.
We got tough, ‘Smitty. We became hired guns, lean and mean and calloused. And after every ambush, every firefight, every “hot” chopper insertion you’d shake and get sick.
You got a bronze star, a silver star, survived 18 months of one demon hell after another, only to walk into a booby trapped bunker and all of a sudden you had no face or chest.
I never cried. My chest becomes unbearably painful and my throat tightens so I can’t even croak, but I haven’t cried. I wanted to, just couldn’t.
I think I can, today. Damn, I’m crying now.
’Bye Smitty,
Get some rest
Source:
Palmer, Laura. Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Vintage Books, 1988. 27. Print.
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