By Guy Miller

In the aviation unit I flew with in Vietnam, our own stupidity and bad judgment usually posed more serious risks for us than those from the bad guys. My assault helicopter company supported the Republic of Korea [ROK] Army troops of the White Horse and Tiger Divisions.
Early in 1972 our ROKs captured a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) Rest and Recuperation center in a mountainous valley of central South Vietnam, complete with a treasure trove of live pigs and corn. To “win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people,” the Koreans decided to donate the captured corn and pigs to their adopted local orphanage forty miles away in Nha Trang.

The only way to get the livestock and produce out was for us to fly them out in our helicopter. The Korean troops chopped a tiny clearing in the jungle canopy on the side of the valley, what we called a “hoverhole,” just big enough to fit a Huey helicopter. I was still a “new guy” in country and was flying copilot, known as “Charlie Pop,” that day when our bird got the mission. It was our first sortie of the afternoon, so the bird was heavy with full fuel, and it was starting to get really hot when we arrived in the valley and wormed our way down through the hoverhole.

There were about two loads worth to haul out, but somehow my Aircraft Commander, the battle-hardened pilot in charge of the helicopter, let the Koreans talk him into trying to fly it all out in a single lift. So, the troops packed bags of corn about two feet deep across the entire floor of the Huey, and then threw the five hogtied pigs on top of the pile and told us to go. I was later to learn that these Vietnamese “potbellied” pigs are considered as high-fashion pets by Yuppies, because they are so cute, but I sure didn’t think so that day.

We were severely overloaded as it was, and air temperature was killing our lift, so naturally as the “Charlie Pop,” I was given the honors of being on the controls to bring the bird out. As I pulled in power and started to climb up through the hole in the canopy, the overloaded rotor was already losing speed dangerously, and the controls were starting to get mushy. Understand, our assault Hueys had no doors.

One thing I should mention is that pigs do not like to ride in helicopters. What I mean to say is, pigs really don’t like to ride in helicopters! So about twenty feet up, half a ton of tied-up pigs started squealing and thrashing around in the helicopter, making control almost impossible. As the rotor blades wallowed around in the hoverhole, the blade tips started chopping leaves and branches, swirling loose debris through the cabin, which really pissed those pigs off.

By this time the entire platoon of Korean troops on the ground were standing directly beneath the helicopter, staring up at this incredible sight. There was no way I could let the bird down without squashing a dozen or so of them.

Fortunately, I guess, the pigs got so agitated that they started knocking bags of corn loose from the pile on the floor. Despite the lurching gyrations of the Huey, as loose corn joined leaves and brush flying everywhere, raining down on the troops, the aircraft lost enough cargo weight that the rotor quit bleeding RPM.

As the rotors finally cleared the canopy, I actually thought we were going to make it out alive, and I started to ease the control stick forward, desperate to pick up some airspeed. Too soon. The front ends of the skids caught in the branches and I thought we were going to nose it in right there.

The Aircraft Commander grabbed the controls away from me and yanked the power control up. This succeeded in breaking the skids free of the trees, but also put an excessive load on the already dangerously slow rotor. Turned out, though, it was the tail rotor that was really trying to kill us, because by this time it had also slowed so much that it was impossible to counteract the overtorque on the main rotor.

I never knew until that day that a helicopter could whirl around after running out of tail rotor control and still remain flying. The books say it can’t. But I guess I wouldn’t be telling you this story if it the books were right.

We spun a pair of clockwise gyrating rotations as the Huey plunged down the valley side, skimming the canopy and slinging bags of corn and two of those damn pigs far and wide. As the aircraft fell sideways, the rotor slid into undisturbed air and the bird began to get enough airspeed to re-establish directional control. Even still, it took about four more hairy minutes to nurse enough airspeed and altitude to finally climb out of that valley and start back to Nha Trang.

We had nearly lost four American aircrew members and a million-dollar aircraft, costing about $1,000 per hour to operate, trying to rescue maybe $50 worth of corn and pigs. All of this so the little orphans could appreciate the humanitarianism of our war effort. As it was, we only got about half of the total loot to its final destination.

I figured it would have been cheaper and far more sensible if the Koreans had just shot the pigs, burned the corn, and gone into town to buy some presents for the orphans. Hell, knowing what I do now, I would have paid for them myself. If only to have been spared the memorable experience that evening of scrubing overheated pig feces out of the helicopter cabin.

Note: As with all war stories, I swear that every word of this is the exact honest truth, because you just can’t make this stuff up.

Previously, I began telling stories of some of the military veteran hospice patients I was privileged to serve as a patient volunteer. Their stories continue ….

My next patient, Mr. Glenn, was a terminal cancer patient who lived with his grandson in a small house perched on a mountainside, two counties distant from my home.

Glenn was articulate and ambulatory, though in considerable pain, and I thoroughly enjoyed our time together. His was my introduction to the heart-breaking family dynamics so often involved in end-of-life situations.

Glenn was divorced, living in his remote house alone when his cancer was diagnosed. Since his two grown daughters each lived at considerable distance, and couldn’t be troubled to assist their dying father, the caregiving role landed squarely on his grandson. Butch was a bachelor who ran a home-improvement business in the county, but he gave up his business and moved in with his grandfather to tend him in his final days. To be able to stay at home, Butch converted his trade into making wooden wishing wells, play houses and lawn ornaments to support himself and his grandfather from home.

The maturity and good spirits of this young man always impressed me enormously. Whenever I arrived for my weekly visit with Glenn, Butch would cheerfully greet me in the driveway, standing beside his truck, ready to go down the mountain for his weekly grocery shopping trip. He never gave any indication that he felt imposed upon by the situation, the burdens of caring for his grandfather, or the abandonment of responsibility by the rest of his family. Our time together was limited to his departure and return from his weekly supplies run, but I always saw in him a degree of love and caring rare for someone so young.

My visits with Glenn were always enjoyable. Even in his pain, his sharp mind clearly showed through. He had been a chemical engineer who joined the Navy in 1940. His first project was to perfect a process to stabilize red phosphorous, so it could finally be used as a primer for explosives.

He turned his patent over to the US government and was rewarded with a commission in the US Navy. Following Pearl Harbor, he was rushed to the Aleutian Islands as a brand-new Lieutenant Commander to command a tiny outpost “defending” his microscopic island from Japanese invasion.

Glenn always spoke of the Aleutians in derogatory terms, declaring that the worst thing we could have done to the Japanese Empire was to let them have the useless islands, and spend their resources defending them from invasion. He seemed disappointed that the attack never came, so he could have abandoned his rock to their hapless troops. In his wry wit, he told me the Japanese were way smarter than the US Government when it came to defending islands from invasion, in the far north at least.

I remembered enough inorganic chemistry to be able to ask occasional intelligent questions, and Glenn delighted in telling me more than I ever thought I would want to know about phosphorous and the remarkable phosphate ion. Following the war, he had spent a career as a research chemist with Kodak, earning numerous patents, and he was a wealth of information about photochemistry. Every week I found myself looking forward with great anticipation to my sessions with this marvelous veteran.

I never did learn much about the family dynamics that led to his dying of cancer on a remote mountainside with only his grandson attending him, beyond the basics. But he never showed any sort of bitterness or resentment. The mutual love between Glenn and Butch was clear in everything I saw.

Every visit, Glenn needed to rise from his recliner and use his walker to get to the bathroom. As a patient volunteer, my job was to assist him up and down, and with his walker, but nothing else. But when somebody needs more help than that, you do what needs to be done without regard to the rules. As time went by, he needed more and more help with this procedure, and I could tell that his energy was slipping away.

So, it was not really a surprise when the hospice organization called to say that he had finally passed. I never knew how well his funeral was attended, or whether any of his family besides his devoted grandson Butch were there, or even whether he received the military honors that he had earned in his wartime service. But I wrote a card of several pages to Butch, and hoped, perhaps, that a part of it was shared with at least someone who would have cared.

*********************
These World War II veterans are a national treasure that has almost completely expired now. Take every opportunity you can to warmly greet any old veterans you encounter. Spend a while with them, listen to their stories and let them know that there is someone who understands and appreciates their military service. That is really all they ask of us.

To paraphrase Frederick Forsyth, Ol’ Weird maintains to this day that the 1982 Falkland Islands War was not entirely his fault.

Back in 1974, when Ol’ Weird was an energetic young captain at Fort Hood,

serving as G-2 Air in the 1st Cavalry Division, he saw a notice announcing a three-year Command and General Staff College course to be presented on post by an Army Reserve schools unit, one weekend a month, plus summer resident sessions. It presented the entire Leavenworth curriculum, lesson plans and exams. Not knowing it was intended for reserve component officers with at least seven years in grade, Ol’ Weird signed up.

By the time Ol’ Weird came up for PCS (Permanent Change of Station) to grad school, he had completed 50% of the course, and his article [a requirement for graduation in those days was to write an acceptable article for publication, although it didn’t need to be actually published] had already been published, which made him eligible for attending the second half in residence at Leavenworth. Officer Personnel Assignments sent him TDY (temporary duty) en route, so Ol’ Weird graduated C&GSC in Bell Hall in 1976, having barely turned 29.

The Commandant assured his class they got every bit of the full course instruction and exams, missing only the guest speakers, special projects and graduate school opportunities. The Commandant called the nine-month regular program his “course for slow learners.”

One oddity of the course was the exam structure. The questions were of the format: Question premise, then “One or more of the following statements are correct. Select all the correct answers.” This made the exam a series of True-False questions, except it was guaranteed that at least one answer in each group was true. Therefore, if a chimpanzee took a crayola and colored the entire answer sheet black, he would average 63% correct on the exam. Passing score was 75%, which meant that a Leavenworth graduate had to prove himself at least 12% smarter than a chimpanzee. Surprisingly, some had trouble passing the exams!

After graduate school and the Foreign Area Officer course, his in-country FAO tour began with the Mexican National War College, a three-year program for senior captains whose graduates are guaranteed to make General Officer. Each year a US Army exchange officer is assigned, normally to the second year, while a Mexican graduate spends a year at Leavenworth. Because Ol’ Weird was already a Leavenworth graduate, a combat veteran, and had impressed them with his above-average Spanish, they put him in their third year, completely unprecedented. Thus in 1979 Ol’ Weird became the first-ever and probably the only US officer to graduate from their War College. Plus, he had the distinction of being the only man in his graduating class never to make General Officer.

Horsemanship was an essential part of the curriculum, with every Friday morning starting at 6:00 AM spent in cavalry drills at the military garrison across Mexico City from the school. As part of the graduation exercises before the Mexican Secretary of Defense, the class put on a riding exhibition, with the nine best Mexican horsemen [out of 24 classmates] plus Ol’ Weird, as an honorary gesture. He at least managed not to fall off his horse before the crowd, and they were all awarded the Diploma as accredited members of the Mexican SECDEF staff, an unheard-of honor for a North American.

So the summer of 1979 Ol’ Weird began six months of in-country travels through Central America, the Caribbean, South America and Brazil – in civvies.

Ol’Weird was in El Salvador the night the bad guys blew up the Israeli embassy and kidnapped a female member of the Peace Corps, and assisted with embassy security. In Bogota the DEA guys complimented his report to the Defense Intelligence Agency on Operation Condor, the Mexican Army drug interdiction operation in Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. [Traveling with his class, Ol’ Weird had been the only US national ever inside that operation.]

In Argentina the US Defense Attaché, an Air Force colonel, asked Ol’ Weird whether he was able to change his travel itinerary. At that time [November 1979] our intelligence agencies were seriously worried that Argentina and Chile were making preparations for war over their disputed ownership of three islands in the Beagle Channel. Since the Argentine government had locked diplomatic personnel down to a 25-mile radius of Buenos Aires, no one had been able to get eyes or ears on what was going on down south.

So, as a tourist, Ol’ Weird bought a round-trip ticket to Ushuaia, the southernmost “city” in the world. Traveling down the coast on a Sunday, his plane landed at seemingly every airfield along the 1,400-mile route. The first few flights were in commercial puddle-jumpers, but after they hit Patagonia there were no more civilian airports. From there on, the Argentine Air Force was the airline, carrying passengers in their cargo aircraft, hopping from air base to air base. At every air base where they landed, Ol’ Weird saw intense activity, with heavy construction under way and aircraft being moved to revetments. The thing that made it remarkable is that Sunday in the Latin culture is the family day, with almost no work ever being done – that Sunday was not a family day.

From the southernmost airfield, it was a two-hour “bus” ride with chickens and goats to get to his destination of Ushuaia, a desolate community on the Antarctic Ocean. After a cold and miserable night in the only hotel in town, Ol’ Weird made the return trip the next day. Turning over several rolls of “tourist” film to the Defense Attaché, Ol’ Weird confirmed for him that the Argentine military appeared deadly serious about preparing for war. The Colonel thanked him for his report, and Ol’ Weird resumed his travels, giving it no further thought.

Two months later there was a huge Vatican announcement that Pope John Paul II had summoned the foreign ministries of Chile and Argentina to Rome, issuing an ultimatum forbidding them from attacking each other. The Pope had intervened to avert an imminent war! Never learned how he found out about it. So much for the war that never happened.

Sadly, peace lasted only until April 1982. It seemed that Argentina had fully mobilized the nation for war, and by golly, they were burning to kick somebody’s ass. So they decided, instead of Chile, to attack the British Falkland Islands. Not entirely Ol’ Weird’s fault.
Falklands Islands

As the world saw, that turned out to be a really bad idea! They should have listened to the Pope.

One day I got an unusual call from Blue Ridge Hospice. They had just enrolled a lung-cancer patient, a man from El Salvador who spoke not a word of English. I had indicated in my patient volunteer application that I spoke Spanish and Portuguese. Even though he was not a military veteran, would I consider taking him on as a patient?

Of course, I accepted, and went to visit Don Pepe. Following his children who were already established here, he had immigrated to the US, and was staying with his son and daughter-in-law, who was his caregiver. Besides them, there was no one he could converse with, and he was severely homesick for El Salvador and deeply depressed. When I met him the first time, he was in a wheelchair on oxygen.

He was delighted to find someone new to talk with, and the fact that I had visited his country and knew his hometown (an obscure suburb of San Salvador) thrilled him. The following week when I called the daughter-in-law to confirm my visit, she said my visit was all he had talked about the entire week.

When I arrived for my second visit he was still in the wheelchair, but not on oxygen. He told me he knew he had killed himself by smoking cigarettes since he was nine, but everyone has to die from something, and cigarettes had given him a lot of pleasure in his life. Right after I arrived, the daughter-in-law went out shopping, so we were alone. He told me how much he missed El Salvador and his friends back there. He had never married his children’s mother, who was still back there. I asked whether he wished they had married, and he said, no, he didn’t really like her very much.

The next week he was sitting in an armchair, and his hospice bed had been moved out of the living room and upstairs. The daughter-in-law was gone for the whole day, so we were alone for the entire visit. He told me things he never would have told his family, about things he had done and women he had been involved with. He talked about his broken dreams for himself and his children, and of all the things in his life he wished he could have changed.

On my next visit, he asked me about my dog Ike, who was staying out in my minivan at the curb. Did I ever take him for walks? Would I like to go for a walk with him now? Grabbing a hat, Don Pepe said, “Let’s go.” To my astonishment he headed out the front door, so I got Ike’s leash and away we went.

We made it about half a block before Don Pepe was gasping for breath, and I worried that I had allowed him to hurt himself, but we rested a bit, and slowly made our way back to the house.

The next week, Don Pepe already had his hat on when I arrived, ready to go again. We walked Ike down the block, and to my surprise, Don Pepe crossed the road and kept going. When I asked where we were going, he replied, “You’ll see,” and led us into an open field. When I asked him whether he had been here before, he replied sheepishly, “I have started going on walks each day. They don’t know.”

From that day on, we went on ever longer walks each visit, talking and joking and really enjoying ourselves. Don Pepe became comfortable talking with me, and told me some of his most private thoughts.

Then one day I called the daughter-in-law to confirm my weekly visit, but with sadness in her voice, she told me, “He’s not with us anymore.” Dreading the news, I asked her when he had died. “Oh, he’s not dead. He went back to El Salvador.”

It seems Don Pepe had gotten to feeling so much better under the hospice regime that he went down to Dulles International Airport and bought himself a ticket home. He told his family that if he was going to die, he wanted to do it in his own country where the people spoke his language, with his friends. And that was just how it was.

* * * * * *

The most moving patient experience I ever had was with Mr. Sam. When I met him, he was dying of cancer and had only one week to live. Seems he had had just one week left for eleven weeks and counting, and his doctors were amazed at how he just kept hanging on. He was in pretty bad shape, but we could visit OK. His wife always stayed around the corner in the kitchen while we talked.

Mr. Sam had enlisted in the Navy during the 1930s, and was there for Pearl Harbor in 1941. He never talked about his Navy service to me or any of his family. We visited a couple of weeks, and he became more comfortable talking with me as time went by. Finally, one visit, his wife left to go to the store. As soon as she was down the street, in a faltering voice Mr. Sam began to tell me his story.

The morning of December 7, 1941, he was aboard his ship, a cruiser in Pearl Harbor.

She was the only American warship to get under way during the attack. His duty station was in the ammo bunker below the anti-aircraft guns. For three hours that morning he passed hundreds of 3” AA cannon up to the guns that were engaging the two waves of Japanese aircraft attacking our warships at anchor. Up and up went his rounds, blasting non-stop toward the attacking enemy aircraft. His ship survived the attack and returned to port afterwards, ready to take the war to the enemy.

The next day, he told me, the Honolulu newspapers carried the headline, “42 CIVILIANS KILLED DURING JAPANESE ATTACK.” With tears streaming down his cheeks, Mr. Sam sobbed to me, “Those were my shells.” He fell silent, and I realized there was absolutely nothing I could say to comfort him.

That night Blue Ridge Hospice called me to say that Mr. Sam had passed earlier in the evening. For seventy years he had carried the horrible secret of his guilt, a secret he had never been able to tell anyone. Defying the doctors’ predictions, he had kept holding on and on, waiting until he could finally share his burden with someone who would understand. He had finally given himself permission to let go.

Between the time when I lost Kay and the time I began to see Noreen, I served as a patient volunteer with the local non-profit hospice organization that serves some 17 counties in the Appalachia area.  Following the six-week training program for volunteers, I asked the hospice organization to allow me to focus totally on military veterans.

I explained to them that for everyone who has ever served in our nation’s armed forces, their military service is a substantial component of their life.  It is a time when they were away from home, many for the first time, immersed in a culture built around honor, loyalty to their buddies and dedication to an ideal far bigger than themselves.  They have met physical and mental challenges their civilian counterparts will never know.  They have known that others’ lives can depend on their performance, and have felt a camaraderie unequalled anytime in their lives, before or after.  They have learned to master complex and dangerous machinery and systems.  Most have earned personal responsibility for the training, safety and well-being of others.

Those who have further experienced combat have voluntarily exposed themselves to dangers unimaginable to the society they have sworn to defend.  They have seen selfless valor, and experienced losses that can haunt them the remainder of their lives.  Many bear the scars of secrets and guilt which they have never been able to share with anyone who hasn’t “been there.”

For many veterans their military service, especially in combat, marks the high point of their entire existence, against which every situation or experience for the rest of their lives is measured and found wanting.  They have faced and survived a test which their civilian counterparts can never comprehend. Every military veteran has his own story he is dying to share with someone, especially with a comrade who understands things he might never speak.  Every vet, regardless of his service, wants to know that someone has heard his story, someone who can truly appreciate and validate the service and sacrifice he has made to his nation.

After much internal red tape, they finally honored my request, and I began my career as a hospice patient volunteer.  During my two years as a hospice volunteer, I had a total of 24 patients that I was able to visit and get to know.  Some I visited only once, because hospice had been called in too late, but others I knew for extended periods.  Many had wartime experience, usually World War II but also Korea, while others had stateside peacetime service, but the common denominator for them all was that they had raised their right hand, sworn to serve their nation, and that their military service deserved to be recognized. And for me, it was an honor to be of some service to each of these military veterans,

Some of their stories are remarkable.

My first patient, call him Mr. Bob, had debilitation and dementia, with impaired speech.  My purpose in visiting him was to give his caregiver wife a chance to have some time to herself.  Every time I visited, he was always in his recliner in the living room.  My first visit, she sat beside him so we could get to know each other a bit. The hospice paperwork had indicated that Bob was a World War II veteran.  I asked about his service in the war, and his wife said he had been in the Army Air Corps in India.  Trying to include him in the conversation, I turned to him and asked, “How did you like serving in India?”  He looked me straight in the eye and gave me a huge raspberry.

His wife, sitting beside him and clearly embarrassed, turned to him and said, “No, dear.  He asked you how you liked your time in India.”  He turned to her and gave her a second defiant raspberry.

With that question now clearly resolved, I went on to learn, with her assistance, that he survived the war unscathed, earned a degree on the GI Bill at Wake Forest University, had a career as a teacher, and they had four children and nine grandchildren.  I told her I would come every week the same day for about two hours, giving her a chance for shopping, getting her hair done, or any other relief from her 24-hour care-giving routine she wished.

As my weekly visits rolled on, I learned that he was a fanatical fan of his alma mater, Wake Forest, and that his favorite activity was his weekly trip to McDonald’s for French fries and chocolate ice cream.

The living room walls were covered with Wake Forest memorabilia and framed diplomas and awards he had earned.

My efforts to engage him in dialog usually were fruitless, more so because the meds he was under made him drowsy.

Usually when I arrived for a visit, his wife would immediately go back to her bedroom, stretch out on her bed and watch soap operas until it was time for me to leave.

As time wore on, Bob simply slept in his recliner more and more during my visits.  I took to bringing a book or magazine while I was with him, and one day his wife gave me a book to read during my visits.  It was self-published by one of the men in his unit, describing their wartime experiences in India.

As ground support troops for the Army Air Corps, they supported the supply airlift “over the hump” to Chinese troops fighting Japanese occupation.

From that I gained an appreciation of his wartime service, and realized the honor I had in serving him in his final months.

As time went on, Bob slid deeper and deeper into lethargy, until one day hospice called me to say he had passed overnight.  The loss and grief I felt in losing my first patient was surprising to me, since I had known all along that it was inevitable.  I told them I wanted to attend his funeral, but they strongly recommended against it.  Based on their experience, they said I wasn’t part of the family circle and my presence could be disruptive or unwelcome.  Instead, I wrote them a long card, highlighting things I had learned or enjoyed about Bob.  Thus for me was the

completion of the hospice cycle, which was

what I had decided I wanted to do.  I found enormous satisfaction from having played a beneficial role for this wartime veteran and his wife.

*       *       *       *       *       *

One patient prominent in my mind was Mr. Jerry.  He had a diagnosis of “debility,” with six months or less projected to live.  He was a retired federal civil servant who had risen extremely high in the Defense Department.

Upon receiving his diagnosis, his daughter had moved him into a luxurious apartment in an assisted living compound, which was about half an hour distant from the city where she lived and had her business.

Mr. Jerry was resentful of his diagnosis, and of his daughter’s decision to put him in assisted living, and of his severely reduced mobility, and of the whole lousy hand that life had dealt him.  His daughter drove over to check on him every morning before work, and every evening when she dined with him in the facility.  She took off work the day I met him, to introduce us and tell me about him.  He just glared at us both the entire time I was there.

So I began my weekly visits with him, but they were a complete disappointment to me.  I started off by asking him about his military service, about funny things he remembered from his time in, about memorable people he recalled, but he just sat in his leather arm chair in stony silence.  So I began to tell him about some of the crazy things I had seen in my military service, but no response whatsoever.  For three weeks I came to visit him, and we just sat there in silence the whole time.

On my fourth weekly visit, about ten minutes in, apparently he just couldn’t stand the silence any longer.  Suddenly . . .

“When I was in the Army, I did a lot of KP. In fact, I did so much KP that they gave me a special job, washing pots and pans.  That was the only thing I was supposed to do – wash pots and pans.  One day the mess sergeant told me to wash out several dozen big glass jars that the mess hall meat came in.  I told him that was not my job, that I only washed pots and pans.  He said, ‘Those jars are the same as pots and pans.”  I said, ‘They are not the same.  Let me show you.’”

And with a giant gesture of his arm, Mr. Jerry said, “I swept the jars off the counter and they all smashed on the floor.  ‘See,” I said, ‘not pots and pans.’  They never asked me to wash anything besides pots and pans again.”

With that, he began to tell me about his Army days.  Mr. Jerry served in World War II on an Army outpost in Greenland, and he said, “For some reason they made me a supply sergeant.”  He told me his supply room was absolutely perfect, so beautiful that every time some visiting dignitaries or generals came through the installation, they always brought them by to marvel at the immaculate supply room.  Every shelf was labeled with its contents, and everything was perfectly folded and aligned.  The counters and floors shined, and the windows all sparkled.  It was magnificent.

“What they never knew,” he told me with a sly grin, “is that the real supply room was two blocks over.”

From that time on, Mr. Jerry could not stop talking about his life.  I really looked forward to our visits, because he told me delightful stories about his time in the service, and about his work later in the Pentagon.  Every visit, he was getting stronger and more vigorous.

One day, he paused and gave me a funny look.  “Want to see my M-16?” he asked.  Surprised, I replied, “of course.”  He directed me to a closet down the hall, where I found, in fact, an M-16, or more accurately, half of an M-16.  In the early 1960s, Mr. Jerry told me, the manufacturer made six M-16s sliced vertically down the centerline, to show the Pentagon the inner workings of their marvelous weapon.  And he had kept one of the six, as his souvenir.

A couple of months into my time with Mr. Jerry, his daughter wanted some medical tests run on her father, but the hospice rules would not allow it.  So they decided to check him out of the hospice program, and he returned to normal life.  I have no reason to believe he is not alive and well to this very day.

*       *       *       *       *       *

We were losing these World War II heroes at an alarming rate, and I was honored at least to have played a part in serving some of them in their final days