The human cost of war

I'm 62 years old and have had cancer 4 times in the past 4-1/2 years. The cancer is from Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam and the prognosis is that it will come back every couple of years untill I die. Now I fully intend to beat cancer every time it comes back, but every once in a while I feel the breath of my mortality on the back of my neck. And it inspires me to write down some of my story while I still can.

I'm inspired tonight by 3 events;
1- Finally listening to the entire 76 minutes of Randy Pausch's, "The Last Lecture"
(which is probably responsible for mortalities breath)
2- Listening to an old acquaintance, Liam Clancy (of The Clancy Brothers) sing "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda", which I think explains the epitome of the human cost of war. And why I detest war and the killing and maiming and crippling (not just physically) of human beings, especially the soldiers who have to fight them.
3- Learning that the nephew of an internet friend is suffering from that maiming in the form of PTSD after tours of duty in Afganistan and Iraq. PTSD is an old enemy who dogged me for 12 years, and sneaks up on me now and then even today. It invaded my dreams, destroyed my marriage, stole my sanity, and nearly took my life.


There was a TV Miniseries a year or two ago called "Band of Brothers". It was about the real experiences of the real men of Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division in WW2. One of the (real) characters in that series was Bill Guarnieri. Bill lost a leg in what history calls "The Battle of the Bulge". The Ardennes forest around Bastogne. When I was a child of 5 or 6 Bill was a neighbor of mine on Daly Street in South Philadelphia.

Another one of my neighbors was Frank Cheatey. Frank also served with the 101st Airborne in WW2. He lost his leg in the Market Garden Campaign in Holland. He and Bill were buddies. Neither of them had prosthetic legs back then. I used to see them coming down the street together, one pants leg pinned up, hobbling along on their two sets of crutches. They used to joke (somewhat morbidly, G.I.s often use morbid humor to hide the pain) about entering a "two-legged race" together. One had lost his left leg, the other his right.

We moved away when I was 7 and I didn't think about either of them for a long, long time.
After coming home from my tour of duty in Vietnam in 1969, I moved back to Philadelphia for 3 years. It was in 1972 that I read in the obituaries that Frank Cheatey had died.

I went to the funeral. There were eight pallbearers bearing Frank's casket. All of them were "Brothers" from the 101st Airborne. Prosthetic legs were better by then and only required one crutch. FIVE of the pallbearers (including Bill Guarneiri) had a prosthetic leg, TWO had a prosthetic arm. As I sit here at my keyboard I can still picture the scene as if it were yesterday.

"Never knew there were worse things than dying"
(lyric from the song)

That's one face of the human cost of war.
There's another, but I can't write about it tonight.
It's about the first time I saw the RESULTS, up close and personal, of some of the bombs that I loaded in Vietnam.