February 1967
A slow mist covered the small country cemetery, and the fog hung heavy and damp on both the hill and the valley below. A lone soldier, dressed in his military green, stood on the small, snow-studded embankment away from the mourners. He lifted his trumpet to his cold, wet lips. The sorrowful notes of “Taps” settled on both the mourners and the neighboring homes in the shrouded mountain holler.
A young girl, only seventeen years old, stood off to the side, tears flowing freely down her pale cheeks. Her family gathered her close and surrounded her, protecting her not only from the February winds but also from the withering glances of the soldier’s estranged family. As she wept, as if she were losing her heart and soul, they stood stoically by, wondering, once again, what caused their nineteen-year-old son to join the Army. Was it that young girl who may have had a half-hearted idea of what a hero was, a soldier in a green uniform? Was it their hardscrabble life of raising eight boys in a six-room house? What was it about this community that caused so many young men to join the army?
They crowded around the casket at the gravesite. They never would accept the girl. Look at her! She was sobbing so deeply as if she knew who he was! He never spoke about her to them. If it were anything serious, he would have told them. Just look at her—did she think she would ever fit into their type of life? She was coddled and taken care of by her parents, not a woman who could make ends meet for her family. She could never work hours in a garden, wielding the hoe to keep out weeds. She would not settle for a lesser piece of beef to use for a stew to feed a family of eight. She would not know how to chop wood and keep the fire going in the hearth or to draw water from a well. She with the gold hair that shines even on this dreary day and wearing that fancy black woolen coat. She, who continues crying as if she lost the love of her life.
She couldn’t be his love. He had not even told them about her!
As the casket of the Vietnam victim was lowered into the ground at the last notes of “Taps,” she leaned on her brother’s tall, lanky frame and slid downward as she fainted at the finality of the death of the man whom she married and lived with as a wife for two weeks last summer.
The second family watched silently but offered no assistance. No, they thought, she would never fit in with us. She could not even accept the inevitability of death on a battlefield, a battlefield he should have never been to in the first place.
They walked away to their car, never acknowledging the other family or their son’s wife who attended their son’s service.