Our Loved Ones' Stories

Another One Gone
Chapter 10 from her book FOR THE LOVE OF JACK by Kathie Costos

Jack’s sister Jean had three children. Her son, Andy was also a Vietnam vet. When he was fourteen years old, he came home from school one day and found his father on the kitchen floor. He shot himself in the head. He was a policeman and an alcoholic. Three years later, Andy was in Vietnam. Jean was several years older than Jack. Andy was born within months of Jack. They both enlisted at seventeen. Andy got addicted to heroin while he was there. He also developed PTSD.

Andy was married for a brief time after he returned. He had a son with developmental difficulties, which Andy blamed on Agent Orange. Andy ended up in prison in the late 1970s. When he got out he tried to get back to having a normal life. He dated and got jobs. Andy was smart and adapted to any job he was given but he was still plagued by his past. He found a job he really loved to do, but his prison record ended that job when they did a security background check.

Andy remembered all the bad things that happened in Vietnam. He remembered a place called the Hobo Woods where it was a "free fire zone." They were able to shoot anything that moved and they did. He remembered finishing off VCs (Viet Cong) with his knife against their throat. He was haunted by a female VC he killed. He remembered a pair of grunts he was friends with named Butch and Sundance. He stopped to tie his boot when they went on ahead of him. They were blown up by claymore mines. He was convinced that they were the mines he put in the ground on a distant road that the VC must have moved during the night. He remembered being wounded twice, receiving the Purple Heart. He did not remember the acts of bravery he showed that earned him a Bronze Star for Valor. He hung onto the urges to fight, yet lost the drive to take charge with heroism.

Andy was a warrior yet the gentleness of his heart would not release him and allow him the peace to live with the necessary evils war demands. It was the goodness of his character that was killing him and made him attempt suicide countless times. It was the force that reached out for help with one hand and pushed it away with the other.

Andy stopped by our house, looking happy and on top of the world. Jack was putting together a vanity for our new bathroom. It wasn’t working out too well considering it was a Saturday and he had gone out earlier to the DAV club and had a few beers. The last time I saw Andy was during all the funerals. Naturally he didn’t look good at the horrible time in our lives. It was good to see him with a smile. Andy had found someone to love him and look past his problems. It had been hard for him to call Jack his uncle when they were younger. They always referred to each other as cousins. It was not until they were both in Vietnam that Andy started to address him as Uncle Jack. That was the last time I saw him and the time that I will remember. I had to hang on to the memory of him happy and in love.

Andy filed a claim with the Veteran’s Administration and got word that his claim for disability had come through. Still the nightmares and flashbacks kept coming. He wanted to put it all to rest but first he wanted to fill in the missing pieces of his life there. He sent for his records. His back was bothering him and a doctor had set up an appointment for a MRI. He was claustrophobic and too afraid of the test. Later he learned that the test could have killed him. He still had shrapnel in him. A few months later, he received a letter stating that the unit he was with did not exist. That sent him totally over the edge to the point of no return. He started drinking again and ran back to his old friend, heroin.

Andy tried to go live with his brother but he had enough of the drugs and bailing Andy out of trouble. He told him that he couldn’t live with him. Andy tried his sister. He got the same response. They had been through too much with him and wanted him to face his demons. They tried tough love. There is only so much a person can take and they had reached their limit. Andy had it all. He had money for the first time in years. He had the love of an understanding, good woman. He had a sister and brother that loved him. All the people in his life loved him and looked past the problems he had. Still it was not enough. Nothing was enough to erase what he saw as a personal assault from the government. He felt he had been thrown out like a piece of garbage just like the records of his unit. It meant to him that it was all a waste. The lives lost were a waste. It was all for nothing.

Andy checked himself into a motel and used every lock on the door. The demons were screaming in his ear while visions of Vietnam invaded the room. He knew he lost the war he had been fighting. He surrendered. He put the heroin into a needle and it was the last night he would have to fight off the demons. His life ended. His brother got a phone call from the police.

I knew how hard it was to love one of these men. You see all the good inside of them that they were blind to. You thought that love could make everything inside them right again. Then had to face the fact that it couldn’t. It made me more aware of the fact that if Jack had not been the way he was when we met, I couldn’t have stuck it out with him. By the time his illness was in full force, we already had the foundation of our relationship. It also made me think about how close we were to it happening to Jack. The level of my grief made it hard to cope with the guilt. What is the value of a life? How many times had I put my needs on a higher plane than his life? I am not fooling myself into thinking that it would have been my fault if anything happened to him, but honestly I can’t imagine getting through it. As much as I understand, I am still just a human and I know that I would take part of the blame. I would run the "should have", "would have" and "could have" through my brain and doubted everything I did do.

I was so sad about Andy and knowing something about the kind of pain he must have been living with. My God, we are just humans and our emotions are so easily confused. We are told not to kill yet we go to war. We are told it is okay to kill if it is in self-defense, yet we put bomb controls in human hands and tell them that it is war. As if that one word "war" is supposed to make the difference between forgetting about it and being destroyed by it. How do you tell a teenager that it is okay to do something they are totally repulsed by? How do you explain to them that they should forgive themselves for the necessary evil they committed when they were called "baby killers" and treated like a sub species?

Andy was like so many others. It ate away at him as surly as the drugs did. Maybe he didn’t have enough hardness in him to keep him wanting to live? Maybe he loved the drug more than anything else or maybe nothing would have given him peace. I knew he started out with a hard life and did some horrible things while under the influence of drugs but he was like Jack in many ways. He was sensitive and that ability to feel so deeply also made him suffer deeply.

I knew that whatever it is that is inside Jack, I was grateful for. There was something there that told him to fight and go on. Some said that it was because of me again. I gave him the support he needed but it would have been a wasted effort if Jack didn’t have structure in the first place. You cannot support what doesn’t exist. It was in him the day he was born and despite the attacks of the world and bombardment of negative influences, it survived. The gentleness was not crushed beneath the weight of the horrors of war, yet it suffered because of the goodness that was there.

Andy’s brother and sister tried so hard to do the right thing for him. They tried to help him out and then they tried tough love. Then they were left wondering what else they could have done. They gave him love but it was not enough to wipe out thirty years of being terrorized by ghosts. Four more lives paid the price for Vietnam. A brother lost his life. A sister and brother are left to pick up the body and say a final goodbye to a life ended so tragically. A lover lost her fight to keep him alive.

It seems I think too much about death lately. It’s hard to avoid when I am surrounded by it. It ‘s not just a matter of the ones that I know. I am tired of reading about Vietnam vets in the obituaries being buried in their 40’s and 50’s. I wonder about the families they leave behind. I wonder about the ones like Andy who died without a home or money to bury him. I cannot believe that any life was wasted.

It was hard to think about things I wanted to talk to Jack about. Things that seemed important to say but I just couldn’t get the words out. I had forgotten how to talk to him. I had forgotten how to let him know I cared about him without worrying about him pulling away. He held my hand during the funeral and I think he was comforted that I was by his side. I just don’t know for sure. I should know things like that after all the years we have been together, but I don’t. We had a month of getting along and working together as a couple around the house. He was home for four Saturdays in a row, which was a record for him. I didn’t want it to end and was afraid that it would end too soon.

I was worried about how he was handling Andy’s death. I wanted to tell him how I thanked God it wasn’t him. I couldn’t tell him. It seemed that every time we started to have any kind of a normal relationship, he ran. He just couldn’t get past the need to isolate or deal with the need to have some kind of connection.

I read so many obituaries in the paper that had the words Vietnam Veteran under the name. They were all so young and I wondered if PTSD had anything to do with the end of their lives. I ended up weeping for the loss of a total stranger.

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