1964 Flashback – Dick leaves for Vietnam

My father and I had said our goodbyes many times in my young life, this was how it worked in military families.  Dad was a Navy fighter pilot, his job took him away from home more often than not.  There would be a lot of commotion for a couple weeks and then dad was gone.

This goodbye, this moment of going off to war, was different.  This time dad was going to a dangerous, dark sounding place — Vietnam.  There was a charge to this goodbye, an excited tension and seeming finality.  Maybe it was my age, just turning 12, able to understand what was at stake for the first time, but it was worlds apart from any previous goodbye.

I remember clearly standing, alone, just the two of us at the door, dad anxious to get on with it, me drawing it out to the best of my adolescent ability. This house, one that dad had only occupied for a brief time and would be mine for the next year seemed like the last safe place. Once out that door there were no guarantees and I was trying my best to make it last.  Crying.  Alone together, he tried to comfort me in the only way he knew.  He assured me he would be back, instructed me to take care of my mother and the kids, told me that the only reason he was going was so that I would never have to go.

Hearing those words in my mind now it sounds like the most bullshit of reasons, a worn out World War II line, but that was how we talked in those days, Communist Threat, Domino Theory, Making the World Safe for Democracy.

It’s what we believed, maybe more belligerently in military families, maybe we all thought that way.  I don’t know what dad really believed about that war,  but I know for sure that he had no idea that the little war he was headed off for in 1964 would still be raging seven years later and that I would get my own chance to walk out that door.