There’s a compelling reason why my list of backwoods bona fides doesn’t include a proficiency with firearms, which are practically a birthright in Montana. Even so, I’ve often confessed my lifelong unease around guns with a sense of shame, but rarely have I explained why.
The truth is my family didn’t own guns when I was growing up out of respect for my dad’s combat experience in the Vietnam War, and because of our sensitivity to the physical and emotional wounds he endured there. My sister and I accepted his wishes tacitly and without objection. We could sense it was a painful subject for him, even if we didn’t understand why.
We knew there had been an explosion because Dad sometimes let us pinch the flesh around his stomach where a hunk of shrapnel had lodged, the shell fragment bulging out like the latex eyes of a Panic Pete squeeze-therapy toy. We knew his best friend, Greg, had died in the explosion and that Dad hadn’t. So, when Dad disappeared during the Fourth of July fireworks finale, we didn’t question his absence. And when, during our visit to a family cabin, where my uncle invited us to tag along while he pursued a family of destructive beavers with an M16 rifle, we politely declined, masking our envy as our cousins joined the stakeout without us.
In high school and college, I tried to gain a better understanding of Dad’s trauma by reading books like Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Richard Herr’s “Dispatches,” and by watching films like “Apocalypse Now” and “The Deer Hunter,” unpacking their rich metaphors with Dad, who was generous in sharing his experiences with me, but only when pressed.
Through those conversations, I learned that Dad was drafted to Vietnam in January 1970 and assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade as part of a six-man reconnaissance team, whose members were ferried into the jungle by helicopter for six-day missions and then returned to base to report their observations. On July 17, 1970, while preparing for such a mission, an explosion in the arms room of the team’s ramshackle living quarters injured Dad and several members of the team, including Sgt. Greg Krueger, of Garrison, North Dakota. The wounded soldiers were flown to a hospital at Phu Cat Air Base, where Krueger died, despite the feverish lifesaving efforts by doctors.
“He laid naked while the medical staff did all they could to save him,” my father wrote recently, in a letter that moved me to tears. “As they turned away with looks of total dejection a female nurse turned back and placed a large square of gauze over his genitals. It remains the most touching expression of quiet compassion I have ever witnessed.”
In honor of Dad’s service, he was awarded bronze and silver stars, and while he does not frequently tell this story, when he does, a listener inevitably inquires why he didn’t also receive a Purple Heart.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I never heard an explanation of what caused the explosion or of why, to my knowledge, none of us were awarded a Purple Heart.”
Recently, Dad set out to answer this question by sharing his story with his congressional delegation.
“I know many years have passed since my injury and since Greg’s tragic death, yet the question still plagues me,” he wrote. “Is there any possibility that, even 51 years after the incident you could provide an answer?”
He continues to wait for a reply.