Vietnam vet at peace at last

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Their eyes are dry when they talk about him. Father, mother, brother, all are composed. In 21 years, you learn composure. You learn to tell what happened in a voice that doesn't betray your soul. You learn polite phrases that put strangers at ease.

"He was always a happy-go-lucky kind of kid."

"He never gave up."

"He adjusted pretty well."

"He never showed any bitterness."

Neither do they. Margaret and Joseph Byszek, both 75, and their son John, 45, tell the story without rancor. They tell the story as if it hadn't gutted their hearts.

Jim Byszek was 22, a college business major when he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Pictures in a photograph album show him fresh from Fort Dix, a good-looking guy with his hair cropped, his uniform pressed, smiling for the camera. The photos are square, edged in white and slightly faded. The year was 1970. Back then, Byszek could walk, run, shave, hail a cab, brush his teeth, hug a girl, scratch an itch, drive a car, catch a ball, feed himself.

A few months later, he was sent to Vietnam. A few weeks later, he was a casualty of war, hit by shrapnel, a victim of "friendly fire," paralyzed from the neck down.

He spent a year in intensive care on a respirator at Chelsea Naval Hospital, three years in hospitals before he was able to come home just for weekends. During those years his hometown of North Brookfield had a parade and dedicated a day to him. Friends rallied and stayed by his side. They wrote letters, sent cards, visited. His parents and brother drove hundreds of miles back and forth to Boston three times a week to be with him.

He couldn't move a muscle. In the beginning, he believed that someday he would. Doctors tried new therapies. Friends and relatives prayed. No doubt, he prayed too.

But praying and believing in something doesn't always make it so. And as much as he yearned, as much as he ached to, he couldn't move.

Resentment might have festered then. He could have nursed his anger and become bitter and who would have blamed him? Life had taken away almost everything it had given him.

Almost, but not all. He had his mind, his eyes, his ears, his heart. He had his friends and his family. And so he got on with his life. He didn't focus on all he'd lost. Instead he focused on all he still had.

He designed a house and had it built on top of a hill and down the street from his parents on land that was once his grandparents' farm, in a place where he used to play as a child. The house was wheelchair accessible, the doorways wide, with huge windows that looked out on the world. It was through these windows he watched the sun rise and set, snow cover the hills in the distance, winter become spring, life push through the ground. Rabbits springing, deer pausing, his own two dogs playing, birds lingering at feeders he had placed throughout his yard, trees blooming, rain falling, flowers blossoming - all these things sustained him.

His brother lived with him and took care of him. John Byszek shrugs this off as if this were nothing. He says that Jim was disabled, not ill, and didn't require all that much care.

But the truth is, he did. He had to be bathed and shaved and dressed and fed. He had to be lifted and propped and wheeled wherever he went. He had to have the telescope he studied the stars with positioned. He had to have someone find and pick up and open the book he was reading. John Byszek was that someone. He was his brother's arms and legs and hands; he was his brother's best friend.

In October 1990, at the age of 42, Jim Byszek died in the house that he built, finally succumbing to injuries inflicted 20 years before. During his last two years, he wasn't even able to get out of bed.

This October, his name, Pvt. James J. Byszek, will be added to the 60,000 names already etched on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. There will be a ceremony and his parents and brother will attend and words will be spoken and praise given for the brave soldier Pvt. Byszek was.

But Jim Byszek wasn't only a brave soldier. He was a brave man. He lived a life most of us would rail at, dying slowly, fading like his old photographs, like the memory of the war itself.

And yet he didn't despair. He took pleasure in the things most of us hardly notice. He loved his family. He loved his friends, his home, his dogs and nature. He continued to see beauty in the world despite what had happened to him.

He adjusted. He never showed bitterness. And he never gave up.