The Medals My Sister Sold

He graduated from Oakridge High in 1965, and he worked our father’s ground and the Hendrickson place next door for two years, and in 1967, the spring he turned twenty, he enlisted in the United States Army. He did not have to. Our father tried to get him a farm deferment and Roy would not take it. I was twelve, and I remember him sitting at the kitchen table telling our mother, in a quiet voice, that half the boys he went to school with were already over there, and that he could not see the sense in a man letting somebody else’s boy do a thing he was not willing to do himself. Our mother cried into a dish towel. Our father went out to the barn and did not come back in for supper. I thought Roy was the bravest man who had ever lived, and I still think that, and I have had fifty-seven years to change my mind.

He trained at Fort Lewis and shipped to Vietnam in the fall of 1968. He was a rifleman, an infantryman, with the 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division, the outfit the men called the Wolfhounds, out in the country northwest of Saigon toward Tay Ninh. He wrote home about every week, in pencil, on paper so thin you could see his hand through it, and our mother read every letter out loud at the supper table and then kept them in a shoebox in her closet. He never once wrote about the fighting. He wrote about the heat, and about a dog that followed his platoon around that they named after our father as a joke, and about how he could not wait to get home and eat a plate of our mother’s chicken and dumplings and sleep in a bed that did not have anything living in it. He asked about me in every letter. How was Dale doing in school. Was Dale still playing ball. Tell Dale to keep his elbow up when he throws. I was thirteen and I did not write back as often as I should have, because I was thirteen and stupid and thought there would be all the time in the world, and that is a thing I have had to make my peace with and never fully have.

In May of 1969, Roy’s company walked into an ambush along a treeline out past a rubber plantation. I did not know any of the details for a long time, and some of them I did not know until this past spring, and I will get to how I finally learned them, because that is the heart of this whole thing. What I knew growing up was only what the Army told us, which was that Corporal Roy Allen Keller was killed in action on the fourteenth of May, 1969, at the age of twenty-two, and that he had been awarded the Bronze Star with a V device for valor, and the Purple Heart, and that his conduct had been in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service.

I was fourteen. I was in eighth-period study hall when the principal came and got me out of class, and I walked down that long tile hallway behind him not knowing yet, and when I turned the corner and saw my mother standing in the school office with her coat buttoned wrong and her face the color of ash, I knew before anybody said a word. I remember the sound she made when she saw me. I have heard a lot of sounds in seventy-two years. I have never heard another one like that, and I hope to God I never do.