The Purple Heart in the School Gym
The program
The program started with the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the music teacher had the third and fourth grades sing the service songs, one verse each, and when they sang a branch the kids asked any veterans of that branch to stand.
When they sang the Army song, I stood up from my folding chair by the stage. So did four of the men along the back wall.
Don, who was Army too, gave me a small salute with two fingers off the bill of his cap.
Then the fifth graders read a poem, and the principal said a few words about service, and Mrs. Halvorson called Ethan up to the microphone.
He was wearing a button-down shirt I had never seen before, tucked in, and his hair was combed flat with water.
He had a piece of notebook paper folded in quarters. His hands were shaking so hard the paper rattled.
“This is my grandpa,” Ethan said into the microphone, too close, so it boomed.
He backed up. “This is my grandpa, Leonard Kowalski. He was in the Army in Vietnam. He carried the mail for thirty-one years.”
He looked at his paper. He looked at me. Then he folded the paper back up and put it in his pocket without reading the rest of it.
“I don’t know very much about what he did,” Ethan said. “He doesn’t talk about it. So I asked him to come and tell everybody, so I could find out too.”
I walked up to the microphone. I put my hand on Ethan’s shoulder, and he stayed where he was, right beside me, and I did not ask him to go sit down.
What I told them
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m Ethan’s grandpa. When I was not very much older than your big brothers and sisters, I got a letter from the government that said I was going to be in the Army.”
“That was in 1968. I was eighteen. I grew up on a dairy farm about six miles from this school, and before that letter I had never been farther from home than Green Bay.”
“The Army sent me to Vietnam in January of 1969. I was in the 1st Cavalry Division.” I touched the patch on the side of my cap. “This is their patch. A horse’s head. We didn’t ride horses. We rode helicopters.”
Some of the little ones laughed at that, and it helped. It helped me more than it helped them.
“The helicopters were called Hueys,” I said. “They would take us out into the jungle, and drop us off, and we would walk. Sometimes for weeks. We carried everything on our backs. Water, food, ammunition, all of it.”
“I was a Specialist Four. That’s not a very fancy rank. It means you’ve been there long enough to know some things, and not long enough for anybody to put you in charge.”
A few of the dads in the bleachers laughed at that one. Along the back wall I saw Don shake his head and grin.
“In my squad there was a boy named Jimmy Fisk,” I said. “He was from Ohio. He was nineteen, same as me. He was the funniest person I have ever met, before or since, and that includes your principal.”
The kids laughed again. The principal laughed too. I waited until it was quiet.
“On the fourteenth of May in 1969, we were walking along a trail near the border of a country called Cambodia. It was very hot. It was always very hot. And people we could not see started shooting at us.”
The gym went still. I could hear the heating vents ticking up in the rafters.
I kept my voice the same as before, plain, the way I would tell somebody about a washout on the road.
“Jimmy was in front of me. He got hurt first. I went to get him and pull him back, because that is what you do. You don’t think about it. You just go. And while I was pulling him back, I got hurt too.”
“A piece of metal from an explosion went into my leg, here,” I said, and I touched the outside of my left thigh. “And another one went into my side, right under my arm. I didn’t even feel the second one until later.”
“I got Jimmy back behind a log. Another man from our squad, Sergeant Riley, came and helped me. We held on to Jimmy and talked to him until the helicopter came. A medevac helicopter, which is like an ambulance that flies.”
I stopped. I had not planned to stop there. It just came up on me, the way the furnace kicks on, all at once and without asking.
Ethan was looking up at me. Without saying anything, he moved his shoulder a little closer under my hand, the way a dog leans on your leg. I do not think he knew he did it.
“Jimmy didn’t make it home,” I said. “He died on the helicopter. I was lying right next to him. I want you to know his name, because nobody in this town ever heard it before today. His name was James Fisk.”