St Thomas More & The Nuns

With sisters: Chapel Hill, NC 1967


Dad gets his ears cleaned: Vinh Thanh, 1967

Sister Jane did not like my Cub Scout knife clipped to my shorts.

Up to the Fall of 1966, Army posts had been my home. Any Army post since they were the same no matter where. Same front gate, P.X., Commissary, movie theater and MP barracks. Grade schools were usually on post and that was life behind the wire. St Thomas More (Grades 1-6) in Chapel Hill was a strange world where nothing was familiar.

My introduction to trouble came by a fund raiser for a new church. I violated all rules of low profile by asking a nun why the Vatican didn't pay for the church. Later, it seems that same week, I stood in line for confession without any idea of what it was or what I was doing there. I saw a line and like any Brat, I joined it.

At lunch, I was caught by Sister Rose with a Playboy picture in an empty chocolate milk carton that had been passed underneath a table to me. I was kicked out of advanced reading class and placed in the slow reading class. I pushed a bully off a stage into a pile of metal folding chairs and I was never fast enough to kneel by my desk when a priest entered class.

I knew I didn't belong, but I don't remember caring. This was just another stop and I'm here to leave. The nuns allowed me time alone in the school chapel everyday. They told me to light a candle for my father and pray for him to come home safely. I would light a candle and sneak out a rear fire door. Steps from the back of the chapel was a golf course fairway where I prowled through the pine needle rough looking for lost balls.

I didn't need to light a candle to know he was coming back. The idea that he might not? It never crossed my mind. Today, I'm not sure where that misplaced optimism came from. Some of it had to do with his being invincible. That much I remember. I was well aware of the Green Beret celebrity at the time. Back at Ft Bragg my father had told me Barry Sadler was an idiot.

If an idiot can have a best selling record and be on TV -- then my Dad is coming home. The principal, Sister Jane, taught the slow readers. She never asked me to read until my last day. After I finished, she stared at me with that pissed off look I had seen so many times. "You do not belong in this class." she said. "No shit." I thought.

Dad came home. The Mayflower truck showed up. It was time to go.

The Magnificent 13

Ft Bragg. 1966. My father's A Team just before deployment to Vietnam. Three men did not return. In memory of their sacrifice. I don't know what else to say. Only, that I look at their faces and remember when they were alive. At a party in my living room with the theme from "The Magnificent Seven" blaring from the stereo as they drank beer and smoked cigarettes . How I wanted to be like them.

"So, what does your Dad do?"

The business of the Army is killing people. Whether you pull the trigger or support those that do. I read that only one out of ten who served in Vietnam actually participated in combat. Of that 10%, there were those who refused to kill. Combat troops, usually drafted, who made the moral decision not to put another human being in their sights and pull the trigger.

Then there were the professionals. The picture of my father was taken somewhere in the Central Highlands in 1966. It is hard for a father to come home and hug his children when he is either:

Learning how to kill people

Killing people

Teaching others how to kill people

I met some caring and loving fathers who killed people in Vietnam. They were always Air Force pilots. Distance from killing seemed to have helped them. Infantrymen do not have this luxury.

I would compare my father with those Air Force officers without really understanding how the war shaped them. It was only when I joined the Infantry that I began to understand.