“I blew my knee out during a training exercise two weeks after basic,” he said.
“Which branch?” I asked.
“Marines. I was going to be a tunnel rat. I knew I’d be good at it because I’m quick on my feet, smart, or maybe just stubborn, and, as you can see, I’ve got a small frame, weighing 125 pounds soaking wet. As a kid, I went places others were too scared to go. I didn’t know fear.”
“Never? You never knew fear?” I asked.
He paused, giving me a hard stare. “I didn’t know fear until I saw my best buddy return from Nam.”
“Were you supposed to go to Vietnam before you blew out your knee?” I asked.
“I sure was. I’d already convinced myself that I was going and that I wouldn’t be coming back. I gave my training my best — everything I had — because I knew I’d be leaving everything in Nam.”
He stayed silent, glancing around to ensure that no one else could hear him but me. When a new song started playing over the restaurant speakers, he spoke in a whisper. It was then that I realized that it wasn’t so much that he didn’t want others to hear; he didn’t want to hear himself speak what he was about to say.
“I hate myself for saying it, but I wish that were the fate of my buddy: I wish he had never returned. Nam took everything from him but kept him alive to suffer.”
“Are y’all still friends?” I asked.
“I suppose you could say that. It’s like I’m friends with two people who share the same name: the gung-ho boy who I bunked with before Nam and the broken man who barely leaves his house since Nam.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“You and me both. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out whether God spared me by blowing my knee or if I was mad at Him for keeping me from being in the foxhole with my buddy. We made a promise to one another — come hell or high water. My buddy took both our share of the hell.”
“You said ‘for a long time’… have you since stopped trying to reconcile things with God?” I asked.
“I’ve made my peace with God. When after years of not saying sh*t about what happened, my buddy told me a story. In that story, I was convinced that evil was real. And in this, I understood that good must also be real. And the ultimate goodness of God was my only way to sanity, and ultimately, salvation.”
“So you reconciled your peace with God by acknowledging the power of evil?” I asked.
“You could say that. For me, it was more about realizing what the devil does to keep us unreconciled to God. That devil may not be able to read our minds, but he sure knows how to mess with them.”
“Explain,” I said.
“We are taught to protect children, not to harm them. That anyone who harms a child deserves a first-class, non-stop ticket to hell. We are not only taught this but believe it… not to believe it is just evil,” he explained.
He shook his head before continuing, his voice cracking, rising in anger.
“My buddy told me that Vietnamese children would run toward him and other American soldiers with a grenade in their hand… pin pulled. Once they realized what was happening, hard choices had to be made. Choices that, one way or the other, you never recover from.”
“I don’t even want to imagine,” I said.
“Those kinds of choices leave you knowing evil—seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, and tasting evil. In the end, these choices make you even question if you’re evil,” he said. “It’s messed up.”
“After knowing all this, how would you describe your relationship with God now?” I asked.
His grey eyes locked onto mine, and as his eyes filled, so did mine. He slowly tapped his heart. “Personal. Very personal,” he whispered.
He wiped his eyes and looked toward the door. “Now, if you’ll kindly excuse me, my buddy’s expecting me. It seems all the chatter around Easter has got him interested in knowing more about Jesus, someone who, I hope to share, was also physically and mentally knocked down, but refused to be defeated. In fact, because of Jesus, we ultimately defeated not only death caused by sin, but that damn devil himself.”
Before leaving, he gave me one last glance. With a slight smile, he said, “God bless us all.”
This column was initially published by CherryRoad Media. ©Tiffany Kaye Chartier.