The tragedies of the Vietnam War seem boundless, but none is greater than the lives and their boundless possibilities that were lost, even wasted, in the conflict. Winston Tharp has this tribute to one of those lives in the last of this week’s Perspectives on the Vietnam War.
Well, it's been over 50 years since we hung around together, Doug. We had great plans for life after high school, didn't we? You were going to search for the holy grail of physics, the unified field theory, and I was going to design elegant electronic devices. I remember that you kidded me that I would end up building better refrigerators. But I think that if anyone was likely to have found that theory, it would have been you.
I'd spent the summer before our sophomore year working as a library page at MIT and was all afire to go there. I talked with you so much about it, I think I put the notion in your head, too. Anyway, when MIT rejected me and took you, I gave you the MIT pennant I'd had up over my bed and wished you well. It was only fair: I was smart, but you were brilliant.
We drifted out of touch when I went off to New Orleans and you to Cambridge. I started down a path that led to a hitch in the Air Force in Germany, and you stayed the course at MIT. When I got your letter saying that your Navy Reserve Seabee unit had been activated and sent to Vietnam, I scratched my head and wondered what that had to do with the unified field theory, but I was preoccupied with getting ready to try civilian life again.
Then in September 1967 I got the letter from my mother with the newspaper clipping . "Sailor killed in Vietnam." It seems you were in your bunk when that artillery round dropped on your tent . I'd like to think that you were like the soldier the World War I poet Wilfred Owen described: