My Favorite Veteran

He was still a very young man, in his early twenties, too young to be curled up on the couch in a fetal position.  His fists were clinched, arms curled up under him and he shivered as if he were lying in a freezer.

One month removed from the Vietnam War, this man was wracked with what has since been defined as PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  I could almost see the anxiety coursing though his body, like electricity, over-stimulating his nerves, constricting all his muscles like some painful venom, and involuntarily pulling his body into a curved ball as if some imaginary string was being pulled him from behind.

He had served honorably, and then some, in his role as an artillery leader, ignoring the capricious fatal end that could await him from the enemy’s mortar rounds, as he called out coordinates.  He had an unusual gift that led to his assignment.  He could calculate the mathematical formulas needed to place a shell precisely where it needed to be even as he himself was under fire.  Yes indeed, courage under fire. 

Now he lay there, broken hearted over a love lost, fearful that he would never be that good at anything else, half deaf from his gun’s report, and weary from too much time spent living on the edge of death. I still remember his telling me in later years what it was like to see rounds aimed at him dusting up the ground, hearing the zings of the bullets as they passed and what it was like to see the tracers that preceded the shots intended for him. I still cringe at the way he described the thump of the incoming mortar rounds and the way their shrapnel shot out like a fountain spraying water.With manly humor and courage he told these stories.

In due time he got well, and  parlayed his gift for calculating numbers under pressure into a very successful career as a commodities futures trader which, coincidently, still employed open outcry. 

He still does not hear very well, and will have a pain in the neck from a herniated disc for the rest of his life.  But what he may never have seen in writing was how proud I was of him, even has he lay on that couch all those years ago.  What he also may not have known was that that was the only time I ever cried for my brother.  As your brother and as a citizen, thank you Anthony, and I love you.

Thank you too to the thousands of veterans who gave of themselves over our nation’s history.