By Answering the Call
This month, our series “This is What Democracy Looks Like” is focusing on veterans, veterans issues and what civilians should know about our military veterans. But because veterans have been a part of my life since before I was born- from my father to back to the American Revolution, I can’t separate it into what someone does for a living or a just a day dedicated to veterans. I know what VA lines look like, and what waiting to be deployed does to a family. I’ve fought with Tricare and have seen my dad go back to school, and there are many sources for these things. But there is something else I don’t think people really know or talk about- that veterans have crossed many lives and connected the world. I want to tell a couple of those stories- the ones we don’t hear about.
My grandfather, Lt Col Earl Gutschenritter (Ret)(above, left), was a veteran of Korea and the Vietnam War. In all the years after, he only told one story to my grandmother, one time, about his 4 years in active combat. In those days, without Skype or much mail, when a soldier from his unit left the field and headed stateside, they would call each other’s wives. Often the calls came from Walter Reed Army hospital and at all hours. My grandmother told me about a 3am call, “Mrs. Gutschenritter, I saw the Colonel 8 days ago. He was well then.” She’d thank the soldier, and then cry. Eight days ago. He could have been killed since. We don’t know what going months without knowing is like.
In yet another effort to draw some information from my grandfather, one day I told him about a PBS documentary I had seen on the Vietnam War. The documentary focused on a colonel who had just deployed for his second tour. In the documentary, his three little girls begged him not to go- they had dreamed, as had he, that he’d be killed in action. He went, as soldiers do. In the documentary, the orders he was given didn’t jive with what he was seeing on the ground, so he refused them, saving much of his unit, but getting himself killed. My grandfather began to tear up and I apologized for upsetting him. He said, “we were in basic training together. I never knew what had happened to him.” It took his granddaughter watching television to bring him decades old news that he his friend had died half a world away. We cannot fathom what that feels like.
About two years ago, a nephew of my grandfather’s had seen something I’d written online. He figured with a name like Gutschenritter, we had to be related and contacted me. We figured out who was who and he introduced me to the rest of the family. Earl’s brother had also served, and in talking to his kids, I learned of a Japanese yen note that my grandfather had sent his brother in the 1950s.
The bill is ripped in half and lists the names of half a dozen men, presumably, those he served with (he was also stationed in Japan and Taiwan). No one knows where the other half is, why my grandfather sent it to his brother, or who the men are. It’s a mystery, but I have faith that, in time, I’ll find the other half or at least one of those men who were important enough to be written down and kept for over 50 years.
Yesterday I posted a photograph (above) of my father with some of the guys he served with in Amman, Jordan in 1990. An old friend saw it and noted that the marine second from the right had passed away last year but she still knew his wife. I called my dad, who had no idea his old friend had passed away. He said this marine was one of the guys he trained in funeral detail protocol, which then got me tearing up. I contacted the marine’s wife this morning, now in California, sent her the picture, and asked her for her email so my dad could write to her about his memories of her husband. She responded right away and thanked me for remembering her husband.
Sometimes I feel like the messenger for the dead, or that perhaps I should just mind my business. It’s not only a prodigious memory and penchant for gross sentimentality, but also that I’m caught in the web of connections these men have made all over the world and across time. I’ve stood on the battlefield at Guilford County Courthouse where my ancestor was shot and loss the use of his left arm. Half a 1940s Japanese bill found its way to Wisconsin, and then back to me half a century later. From Jordan to Japan; from Fort Leonard Wood to Vietnam, these men have left have left a trail, connected our world.
When you move as much as military families do, it’s rare to keep too many tokens or track of old friends. We don’t know the imprints we leave on other people, thousands of people, just by being somewhere- just by answering the call.
We know veterans have fought for many reasons, in many ways. But it’s not only securing a border, completing a mission or defeating an enemy that matters; it’s what they build. Bridges. Third culture kids. Bonds and memories. Global opportunities that no family barely above poverty line could possibly have any other way.
When we lived in Turkey, my dad always brought candy to give the kids in more remote areas. I wonder now if any of those kids remember my dad, if that shapes their views on Americans, the way my experiences with Turkish people have mine. I wonder if an old man in Japan has the other side of that bill, like a friendship necklace. Only occasionally do we get to know, like this morning when the marine’s wife told me her grief is constant, but that pictures of her handsome husband bring a smile to her face.
I can’t write about veterans as well as I would like. I am not a soldier. It’s not my story so I don’t feel I have the right to tell it. But my story is intertwined and I don’t know how to separate it either. And so this week, I’ll do what I’ve always done, and try to bring people together to hear the stories, the missing pieces. We’ll be talking with retired airman Gerald Givens about what it means to serve, transitioning from active duty to the civilian world, and what’s important for us all to know about veterans. The show live streams Tuesday, November 14th at 7:30pm from the StrongerNC page (you’re welcome to attend and send in questions).
