Forever 20

Tacked on the wall above my desk is an etching of a name. Whenever I think I am having a bad day, I take a moment to look at it. It is the name of a college roommate, Daniel B. Christenson from Oroville, Washington, who would trade me places in a heartbeat. That’s because Danny does not have one. He is forever 20 years old and has been since May 18, 1968 when an encounter in a foreign field half a world away ended his life.

That thought was with me before, during, and after the Memorial service held on May 27 by the Brewster American Legion Post 97 for John Timothy Lane and Marvin E. Galbraith, two Brewster High School graduates killed in action in Vietnam that same year. The irony did not escape me that these three young men, who lived their brief lives so close to each other in distance, died so close to each other in time.

Those who visit the Vietnam Memorial in Constitution Gardens near the national mall in Washington, D.C., will see near its western entrance a Frederick Hart sculpture of “three young soldiers, one white, one black, one of ambiguous ethnicity, seemingly returning from patrol or a night listening post outside the perimeter…as if the soldiers had just broken through a clearing and unexpectedly come upon it,” writes Robert Timberg in his book, The Nightingale’s Song.

A night LP in Quang Tri province about 20 klicks (that’s about 12.5 miles civilian) south of the DMZ became Danny’s disputed barricade.

Shortly after setting up their forward position, Danny’s unit detected the presence of advancing NVA regulars. Soon they were under attack by superior numbers. The decision was made quickly to retreat to the safety of the base camp perimeter. Dan was carrying the heavy firepower of the group, a 7.62mm (caliber .308 Winchester) M60 cal. machine gun, at 23 pounds an effective but cumbersome weapon. As he covered the withdrawl of the others, Dan had his rendezvous with a round from an AK-47.

The recovery team found him the following morning.

He had taken a single round to the chest.

The muzzle blast from that bullet sent shock waves halfway around the world and ripped through family, friends, and the Oroville community Dan called home. Many years later I was talking to my nephew-in-law who was raised there. I mentioned Danny, assuming the younger man would have no recollection of the event.

“Oh, yes,” he recalled. “I was pretty little at the time. But I remember being on the school bus as it passed the cemetery when they were holding his service. There were so many people there. It was very sad.”

I clearly remember when and where I was when I heard the news of Danny’s death. There was a Bob Dylan song playing in the background about a down-and-out dancer entertaining his jail cellmates… a line about a long-lost companion dog and “after 20 years he still grieves.” I hate that song now, and so did my late wife, who also knew Danny. Every time we heard it, it took us back to that awful day. After 55 years we still grieved. One of the last things we did together before I lost her was say a prayer for Danny and others we knew who either did not come from that conflict, or who did, only to fall victim later.

One would think that a Texas Air National Guard pilot who came of age during the Vietnam conflict would have learned from it and would be the last one to drag us back into a second even more costly and prolonged blunder in Iraq as president 28 years later.

In his trilogy on the origins of man, author Robert Ardrey argues in his opening volume, African Genesis: “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels.”

He may be right. On the other hand, it may not be risen apes…but killer angels.