A soldier remembers

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

He told the story offhandedly, as if it weren't the most important story of his life. He tossed it into the air the way you'd throw a football at a picnic, casually, no goal post in sight, just a friendly game of catch going on. As if no one were keeping score.

His smile sent the same message. But his story told a different tale.

Paul Joseph graduated from Archbishop Williams High School in 1964. We were classmates. We must have been friends, too; he signed my yearbook. But a lot of life has been lived since then.

We had our 35th reunion a few weeks back and were standing around talking, trying to fill in the years with credit-card history questions. What do you do? Married? Children? How old? How many?

And there it was suddenly, the story that told the whole story, not just his, but hundreds of thousands of others.

He was talking about how and where he met his wife, cocktail conversation. He dated her steadily for a few months but then he got drafted. Just out of college, his number got called and that was that.

"I was on my way to Vietnam."

She wrote to him every day and he wrote to her and that was good. But what was better is that once a week when he'd tear open a letter, a playing card would fall out and he'd hang it on a makeshift line over his cot and he collected those cards and counted them every time he got lonely for home.

For each card represented a week already spent in Vietnam and every card he received meant he was one week closer to leaving. "The tour of duty was 52 weeks," he explained.

Rats gnawed at those cards. "You could tell the oldest. They were the smallest. The rats ate away at them." But they were all still readable the day he left for patrol and didn't come back.

"I was laid up for eight months in a hospital," he said, using 10 words to cover 240 days.

"What happened?"

"It doesn't matter," he shrugged.

Toward the end of the eight months, he was finally transferred to a place his girl could visit and she arrived one day. And what did she have with her, but the rest of the deck of cards.

Joseph's 23-year-old daughter was standing next to him as he related all this. His daughter had never heard this story.

"He never told you?"

"No."

"Why didn't you tell?"

Another shrug.

Joseph married after he left the hospital, made a career in the military, is retired and has begun his second career. He lives with his family in Virginia.

And that's his life - a life with a huge detour cut into its prime.

Vietnam vets remain quiet about the war they fought. They are seldom the ones held up as heroes on Veterans Day. If World War II vets are the kings of military service, Vietnam vets are still its pawns.

For a long time, they couldn't talk about the war. Now, all these years later, when they do talk, they underplay their heroics. They say, "It doesn't matter." They still do not think of themselves as heroes.

But they are.

For what they leave out when they speak is far more important than what they put in. And in their silence lives their sacrifice - their lost youth and innocence and time - all the things we praise and thank every other veteran for.