The Bronze Star Clyde Gave Back

The first shop was in Elizabethtown, in a strip next to the feed store, between a nail salon and a place that sold used appliances. A bell rang when I pushed the door.

The clerk was a young man with a ring in his lip and a Wildcats hoodie. He was playing something on his phone and did not put it down.

“Help you?” “I am looking for a medal that may have been pawned here on Tuesday,” I said. “A Bronze Star. Along with a set of Army dog tags.”

He finally looked up. He had kind eyes, which surprised me. “Ma’am, I can’t talk about tickets. It’s the law. Anybody who pawns something, that’s between them and us.”

“I am not asking you who pawned it,” I said. “I am asking you to look in your cases.” I held out my phone. He took it, and the corners of his mouth went flat.

He walked the length of the counter slowly. He opened the back room and checked a shelf. He came out shaking his head. “We’ve got nothing like that, ma’am. I am sorry. I would tell you.”

The second shop was in Vine Grove, a low block building with iron bars over the windows and a hand-lettered banner about buying gold. Inside it smelled like machine oil and old carpet.

“Honey,” she said, “I have guitars and drills and about forty wedding bands and not one single medal. If something like that came in, I would call you myself. Leave me your number.”

I made it as far as the parking lot. I need to tell you what that medal is.

Vernon does not talk about it.

In fourteen years of marriage I heard the full story once, from a man at the Legion hall who had served in the same battalion, and he told me while Vernon was across the room being handed a pie.

In February of 1991, in the Iraqi desert, Staff Sergeant Vernon Hensley was a mechanic with the 24th Infantry Division. His company lost two Bradleys in a night movement, stuck to the axles in soft ground and taking fire.

Vernon crawled out under it with a recovery chain. He hooked the first one himself. He hooked the second with a bullet hole through the sleeve of his jacket.

Nobody died that night. That was the point of it, Vernon would say, if you ever got him to say anything. Nobody died.

The Army gave him the Bronze Star Medal, and a paper that said why, and he put both in a frame, and he hung the frame beside his chair where he could see it every night of his life.

He never wore the ribbon in public. He never mentioned it at church. When a boy at the diner once asked what the little frame was, Vernon said, “Just some metal, son,” and went back to his eggs.

It was not just metal. The dog tags were the second thing. He wore them for the whole war and then stopped, because a man cannot wear them forever. They hung beside the frame, a little tarnished, with his name pressed in.