TheBanyanTree: A sad memory

[Sharon Mack]

DONNY YOUNG

 

I don't remember a lot about Donny.  I was fourteen and a freshman in high
school; he was a senior.  I was new to the school and had very few female
friends.  New girls are always a threat to those already established in
their cliques.  The males on the other hand, were delighted to befriend me.
There was Ronny, Donny, Steve and another new girl, Ginny.  The five of us
were always together my freshman year.  All were seniors but Steve and I.
It was sad when they graduated.  They were sorely missed.

 

Ginny moved to California with her family.  Ronny stayed in town and got a
job in construction.  Steve and I entered our sophomore year and Donny went
to war.  He went to Vietnam.  We all wrote him.  He sent a few pictures.  I
had never met his family before but somehow with him being away we
gravitated to his home and his mother.  We sat around the kitchen table in
their small inadequate house with his Mom and the other siblings and talked
about Donny.  When I think back, it seems like we were already preparing for
his inevitable death.  Vietnam was frightening.  At the time we didn't know
a whole lot about it, neither the war nor the place.  Only that it was in
Asia and it was hot and had treacherous jungles.  This we got mostly from
Donny's letters.

 

Donny had barely finished his first tour when he got hit.  He walked over a
land mine.  No one in his small company survived.  He came home in a closed
casket with the American flag draped over it.  The casket remained closed.
There was nothing to view.

 

My reaction was numbness.  A dull ache that I still can't describe.  My mind
couldn't absorb it.  I don't think I ever have, even though I have since
experienced other deaths.  I think the difference was that he was one of
ours.  He was our pal, our buddy, our friend, our neighbor, our schoolmate.
He made us laugh.  We had danced together.  We went to football games
together.  We talked and talked and talked together.  We wrote letters back
and forth.  He was supposed to come back and rejoin OUR RANKS!

 

But instead he died.

 

Two years ago I went to Washington D.C. with several friends. It was an
educational trip put on by the college that I work for.  I visited the wall.
I drove my friends crazy..I HAD to find Donny's name.  

 

I did.  

 

I have a photo of me standing at that wall touching his name.  The photo is
so clear you can read his name.   As I write this tribute, forty-one years
after his death, I find myself crying for the loss of this young man who
fought for our country.   The reminder is with me every day, as young men
die once more in a country far, far away.  Another country few of us know.
A country, whose culture we don't understand.  

 

People tell me it isn't the same, but for me..it sure does feel the same.