Memorial days

While we're on the subject of the last full measure of devotion, I give you small-town America at its finest: the burial of Specialist James M. Kiehl, KIA Iraq 23 March 2003.

(Lest you think it a hoax, it’s been vetted by Snopes.)

In summer of 1986 I was driving across the US with no particular goal except to get back to LA. I was in South Dakota and pulled off the highway to get breakfast. I found a café in downtown Somewhere Small, the kind of place where there are more grain silos than third graders. As I watched the waitresses pour coffee for the old guys in overalls and John Deere caps I wondered how the Vietnam war must have affected communities like these. All the press was about the PTSD vets in the cities and suburbs, the maladjustment, the drugs, the whole Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July thing.

But in towns like this, where the mix is as homogeneous as it gets in this country, where the biggest weekend excitement is high school football games, where any change to the dynamic puts everything out of balance, what sort of ripple effect would having your boy come home in a box cause?

(Not to mention having him come home messed up in ways inconceivable to the Friday-night football crowd.)

I wondered how many of the Somewhere Small football team had taken their first trip out of the county on buses headed for Fort Ord or Parris Island, and how many of those on the buses returned. If every man is “a piece of the continent, a part of the main”, then displacing even one bit, shifting it this way or that, alters everything. For all of us. It spreads out, reaching us all sooner or later.

And I wondered how those effects were still playing out there, more than ten years after the fall of Saigon. Which of those old guys was missing a son or grandson? Whom did the waitress mourn as she brewed more coffee?

I like to imagine my Somewhere Small town would have rendered the sort of honors as Comfort, Texas, did Spec. Kiehl.

Something to think about as you mark the official beginning of summer, spiff up your white shoes and break out the citronella candles. Just because you and I aren’t from Comfort doesn’t mean that Spec. Kiehl’s death hasn’t changed your world and mine.