Veteran’s Day 1968
Veteran’s Day, 1968. An excerpt from Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion after War.
He spoke of his time in Vietnam as unavoidable, a river to cross, an obstacle to remove. Once the orders are issued, he said he would face court martial if he didn’t go.
“There’s no other choice,” he said. “I have to go even if Dad says the war is a mess right now.” What his father had said was that there was a disconnect between what was happening on the ground, in the jungles, and what politicians and the Pentagon perceived the war to be and expected it to be, a reality which would not be unraveled from the fundamental untruths and hyperbole of the war until years later. But, I understood nothing about what he was about to step into.
“We’ll survive – I’ll be home by Christmas next year,” he said. “Then I have only one year before I can get out of the army completely.”
I promised to write every day and prayed for the rash to go away.
“Letters – that’s all we’ll have over there,” he said. “Where I’ll be, there won’t be any other communication except mail.”
The anticipation of verbal silence, physical distance, had its own power. It began slowly with long silences and idle activities, constant unspoken preparation. We could drive for an hour together without a word between us. We unpacked and repacked, organized cleaned, straightened, made lists. On our last night together on November 10, 1968 we barely spoke. We expressed our love for each other only with our bodies. The poison ivy scourge had […]
National Nurses Week 2015: Celebrating Those Who Care
During National Nurses week 2015, from May 6 – 12, we acknowledge and celebrate the excellence and dedication of those who choose the nursing profession. I grew up surrounded by nurses in a nursing home that my family owned and operated. The patients were mostly elderly people who had the usual physical and mental problems related to aging, but we lived in a rural area and my mother’s skills as a Registered Nurse also made her the go-to person for many emergencies around the village – cuts, burns and even broken bones, head injuries and emotional problems.
I can see my mother calmly cleaning and dressing a bloody wound caused by broken glass and, on another occasion, carefully positioning a child’s possibly broken leg after a fall from a tree. Eventually, a doctor might become involved, but watching my mother and her colleagues in action day after day offered me firsthand knowledge that nurses, always women in those days, were unsung heroines.
Nurses in war zones and military settings have done their job quietly and largely unnoticed as well, putting their lives in peril on the battlefield for centuries. Yet, little is known about their experiences in war or exactly how many participated. Even appropriate financial remuneration has been meager and long in coming. Only at the end of the twentieth century did nurses’ pay, both in military and civilian life, begin to become commensurate with the risks and responsibilities of their jobs.
Many women served as nurses during the Revolutionary War, but they are barely mentioned in history books. The Second Continental Congress, heeding George Washington’s advice […]
A Veteran’s Day Remembrance
My husband, Capt. David R. Crocker, Jr., left for Vietnam on November 11, 1968. Veteran’s Day always brings back the memory of his early morning departure from a small local airport. This year, on the anniversary of his death in Vietnam, May 17, I published a memoir about that time in my life and the aftermath. I’m happy to say that the experience of writing this book and reconnecting with the men who served with him in Vietnam has been transformative. I have reconnected with a neglected past. The following is an excerpt from the first chapter:
Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War
Truly nothing is to be expected but the unexpected!
Alice James (1891)
On May 17, 1969, when I was twenty-three, my husband, Captain David Rockwell Crocker, Jr., was killed in the Vietnam War.
We had married on the day after his graduation from West Point in June 1966. Three years later, after six months in Vietnam, he was mortally wounded while inspecting a deserted Viet Cong bunker. He had entered the small dark enclosure with his first sergeant along with a Vietnamese translator, and another soldier, who was a conscientious objector, carrying a bulky radio.
There are speculations about what happened next in the bunker. Possibly an unseen wire like fishing twine, strung overhead, connected to the trigger on a booby trap; probably the antenna, projecting up from the radio, pressed against the wire. The explosion sent earth, human flesh, glass, bamboo and shrapnel in all directions. Dave survived for a few hours with fatal wounds to his […]
A Friend in Need: Memories of War
The following is an excerpt from the memoir: Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War.
There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.
Dwight David Eisenhower
It’s late April 2011, and already broiling hot at the entrance to the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center in Columbus, Georgia. This outing is part of the planned program of events during my fourth reunion with the guys of Alpha Company. Once again, we’re part of a motley crew of former GIs who served in the 22nd US Army Infantry Division in various wars, a few spouses, and me, the only Vietnam War widow in the group. In spite of the fact that we are here among about two hundred veterans of all ages, our section of the bus – those connected in some way to Dave’s Company back in 1969 – behaves like a merry band of war buddies, joking and teasing, ribbing each other about things that happened long ago in the region of Tay Ninh. Now they include me in their repartee, as if I had been there, too.
Our bus driver, Ike, a thin, talkative man, lightens the atmosphere further when he chimes in over the loud speaker in his melodious Georgia drawl throughout the two-hour bus ride from Atlanta with quips like: “Whatever you folks do back there behind me, don’t wake me up while I’m drivin’ “
How amazing to be on a road trip with these guys who were with Dave forty-two years ago in the jungles of Vietnam.
Each time I’m with these men at a reunion I’m flooded with the feeling that Dave is present among us, that he is smiling at me from somewhere in the room.
Joe, […]
Sisters Among the Gold Stars
It was a muggy July evening in 1946 when five women whose husbands had died in World War II traveled to Hyde Park, New York, to meet with another war widow, Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in her news column, My Day, that they, “…came for supper, and then went to Poughkeepsie the Lafayette Post of the American Legion had given them permission to use a room for a meeting. It was a small meeting, though the casualties among servicemen from Dutchess County were pretty high.” In fact, more than 175 men from Dutchess County alone were killed or MIA by 1945.
The five women who met with Mrs. Roosevelt had grown from an original group of four widows who had first met together in Marie Jordan’s apartment on West 20th Street in New York City in 1945 to talk about how they might band together to support the needs of war widows and their children, and to participate in memorial and recognition ceremonies for the war dead. Their appeal to Mrs. Roosevelt to join with them after President Roosevelt’s death was auspicious. She became one of the original signers when the Gold Star Wives of America was chartered as a non-profit organization whose purpose was to do any and all things to benefit the spouses and children of persons who died in war or as a result of service connected illness.
Today there are more than 9,000 active members of Gold Star Wives and potentially 80,000 more survivors who are eligible for membership. It is not a group that one covets simply because of the very fact of how you become eligible. But, […]
Remembering War
This essay entitled “My Buddy’s Hat” also appears in the winter issue, 2013, of the on-line Journal PersimmonTree.org
“There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”
Dwight David Eisenhower
It’s late April, 2011, and already broiling hot at the entrance to the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center in Columbus, Georgia. This is the recreational outing during my fourth reunion with the guys of Alpha Company. Once again, we’re part of a motley crew of former GIs who served in the 22nd US Army Infantry Division in various wars, a few spouses, and me, the only Vietnam War widow in the group. In spite of the fact that we are here among about two hundred veterans of all ages, our section of the bus – those connected in some way to Dave’s Company back in 1969 – behaves like a merry band of war buddies, joking and teasing, ribbing each other about things that happened long ago in the region of Tay Ninh. They include me in their repartee – as if I had been there, too.
Our bus driver, Ike, a thin, talkative man, lightens the atmosphere further when he chimes in over the loud speaker in his melodious Georgia drawl throughout the two-hour bus ride from Atlanta with quips like: “Whatever you folks do back there behind me, don’t wake me up while I’m drivin’. “
How amazing to be on a road trip with some of the guys who were with my husband forty-two years ago in the jungles of Vietnam.
Each time I’m with these men at a reunion I’m […]
Reunion: Circle of Remembrance
Dave (wearing headphones) and members of Alpha Company.
My face was bathed in the scent of a potpourri of aftershave lotions by the time I had been kissed by the last guy in line in front of me. This was not a typical reunion with old friends or classmates. I hadn’t known any of these men until this moment. As they hugged me and planted friendly kisses on my cheeks, they gave brief introductions:
“I’m Joe. I carried the code book for the Captain.”
“I’m Phil. I was his track driver. I don’t know why I wasn’t driving for him that day.”
“I’m Dick. I was one of his platoon leaders. So glad you’re here. Dave was the best CO ever.”
“I’m Lon. He was my hero.”
“There are so many stories we have to tell you,” they say. “He was the best of the best.”
They said they had known about me in ‘68-‘69 even if I didn’t know them. My husband, Army Captain David R. Crocker, Jr., carried a picture of me in his pocket in Vietnam, and at some point he had taken it out and shown some of them; perhaps some quiet moment when they sat around eating “beanie-weinees” or “ham and lima beans” from a pack of c-rations, or playing Blackjack back at base camp. For an infantry company in the area of Chu Chi province, there wasn’t much down time. In April, 1969, one month before Dave was killed with four […]
