I want to talk about war today, and about the men who fight.
Springtime is the reason, I think. It was this time of year I was last overseas with a group of soldiers, a heady time spent just outside Baghdad.
I still hear from some of them, always about this time. I do not know if there is some odd spring connection that way between us. It just happens that way.
I was fooling around on the computer when an e-mail from Gary Baty flashed onto the screen. It had been six years since we had seen each other. In the picture he sent he is in uniform, standing outside a tent, as dust-covered as I remembered him, one of his arms slung over the shoulder of an old man in a kaffiyeh.
He is in Afghanistan now, in a different war from the one we had shared.
The last time I saw him was at an Army base the day I climbed into a helicopter, headed for home, just days after a bomb had exploded relatively harmlessly beneath our Humvee.
He was not himself when he arrived home some nine months later. Justin, his best friend, his roommate, a man Gary had named his own son after, was killed when a different bomb exploded, turning the man virtually into a mist.
Gary seemed lost at home. He could not stay out of his own way, and the trouble he so thoroughly courted always found him.
There is no way, I figured then, he would re-enlist in the Army, which I wasn’t so sure would consider having him anyway.
But there he was, no longer an immature, joke-a-minute 21-year-old, but a seasoned veteran with a sleeve full of stripes, embracing both an old man and an M-16.
Stay safe, I implored him, finishing an Internet chat across an ocean.
“Brother,” he replied, “I always do.”
That same day, a different letter arrived.
It was from Owen L. Dugan, a retired Air Force colonel. He wanted to know why the newspaper did not cover an April 8 event at Prairie View High School in Henderson.
It had, he said, moved him to tears.
The event, which The Denver Post photographed, was organized by Kelly Gonzales, a U.S. history teacher at the school. He called it A Tribute to Vietnam Era Veterans, and had begun working on it at the start of the year.
The idea was, he said, to give them the welcome home they had not received after the war.
He began by calling state and federal representatives, attempting to find any artifact of the war that was available. And then he got students, teachers and members of the community involved.
They put together musical selections; uncovered more artifacts, including a Vietnam- era tank; created exhibits, such as replicas of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.; and compiled video and oral presentations.
The enthusiasm for the project, Gonzales said, was unlike anything he had witnessed in 26 years of teaching.
On that Friday, more than 400 Vietnam War veterans from 13 states traveled to the school for the presentation.
“I was moved to tears by the tribute they paid us,” Dugan said. “Here they were, a bunch of students honoring men and women who fought an unpopular war, one that took place before they were even born.”
He and the others, he said, stayed after the ceremony to thank the students and speak with them about the war and its aftermath.
“As I was leaving the tribute,” he said, “an old Army vet came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘I will never forget this day.’
“Nor will I.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
