An Ordinary Hero
Ashley Davis

            Why does it always rain at funerals? The line of cars in the procession seemed to be moving slower and slower. Slower than the last six months, slower than twenty-two years. Twenty-two years old, that’s how old Harold Headen had been when he was killed in Vietnam. Only six months in country and the dumb son of a bitch had stepped on a land mine right in the middle of Hamburger Hill.  Hamburger Hill they called it, and hamburger is just what Harold probably looked like right now; two hundred pounds of ruined flesh. It was not as though his life had been wasted though; Yogi had known Harold since junior high school, and he had been a witness to some of the guy’s finer moments. He had been a good ball-player; always popular with the girls; and funny—Harold could always make him crack up.  Yogi remembered how his best friend had left notes when he came to visit and found the house vacant; he always signed the notes “The Phantom” after he raided the refrigerator.

            But his parents never minded—that was the thing about that boy; nobody could stay mad at him for very long. Except, of course, Harold’s parents.  In their eyes, raised hell. But Harold would have made a good doctor; he loved people; he would have saved lives; it was a shame he could not save his own.

            The mourners had gotten out of their cars now, and were struggling on foot through the wet turf in a single-file line. Girls wearing high heels were paying for their vanity by sinking ankle-deep in the mud. Mud. That had been one of Harold’s major complaints about Vietnam, all the mud.  He said it bred bacteria and stuck to your skin like glue. Worse, it smelled like baby shit and was the exact consistency and color—sort of a dull brownish green. Come to think of it, Harold had said, the fatigues he clothed himself in every day had the unmistakable hue of baby excrement as well. God, Harold hated the military!

            The line lurched forward again and Yogi remembered waiting in a similar line at the National Guard Armory one year before. There had been fifteen hundred applicants for the position he was trying to grab. Late as usual, he was about twenty minutes beyond the appointed time for the Guard test--a much dreaded pen and paper affair that could either guarantee you a ticket to Vietnam or save your ass—it was the latter that Yogi was praying for. Weeks later, he was surprised to receive his deliverance—a notice that he had been chosen for the single slot available in the National Guard, thanks to being the first candidate to “max” the aptitude exam.  One month later, he was on his way to basic training in San Antonio, Texas.

            Guns fired. Yogi always found the twenty-one gun salute grimly ironic, considering the circumstances in which the decedent usually came to be the star of this particular show. Besides, he had never liked guns; thank the Lord the only real combat he had seen had been the ass whipping the boys received at the hands of the Drill Instructors when he was in Basic Training. In fact, the recruits in the Guard platoons had it easy compared to the intensity of the training those slated for active duty had received. On the way to the Burn Unit that he worked in during his time in Texas, Yogi had witnessed the brutality of the “exercises” the platoon sergeants staged to make their men battle-ready. Mock wars were initiated between the squads with the order given not to stop until blood was drawn. It seemed that the first casualty of war for the kids going into battle was to be their civility –even to the members of their own “team”.

            “On behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation…” the murmuring of words intended to be a comfort were barely audible from where he stood, but the tears coursing down Terry’s face were easily visible. Harold had married his high school sweetheart about six months before he shipped out, and Yogi and his own young wife had driven in for the wedding.  Terry was a beautiful girl with long, shiny black hair and big, soft brown eyes, and because of this feature, “Brown Eyed-Girl” was their song, although Harold had always joked that the “making love in the green grass” line was wishful thinking on his part. He wondered what Terry would do now, a widow at twenty years old, crying as she held Harold’s Senior picture in one hand, her other resting on her pregnant belly.

            Yogi and his wife had given the happy couple a silver picture frame as a wedding gift, but he had given Harold a large bottle of single-malt Scotch as a going away present (a bend over and kiss your sweet ass good-bye present, Harold had said). The bottle had been dug out of a Liquor store dumpster and refilled with mouthwash as a joke, the seal carefully repaired and a red bow attached, a payback for the countless practical jokes that had been played on him through the years. Yogi wondered when Harold had discovered the prank –he couldn’t stop thinking about his final, cheap attempt at humor.

            Finally, Taps began playing, and as the thin, lonely melody drifted over the cemetery Yogi thought again how wrong this was—Harold would not have wanted a military funeral—he hated the Army. Harold’s wife should not have been widowed at twenty, and his child should not have been orphaned before he was even born. Yogi should not have lost his best friend. The worst crime of all was not how many times this had happened before to other husbands and fathers and sons and friends during the course of this war, but how many more times it would happen again, before the war ended.

            Yogi Friederichsen graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in Biology, after deciding to become a doctor like his friend, Harold. Unfortunately, at the end of his service in the Guard and completing his education, he was considered “too old” to be a serious candidate for medical school. He eventually became the C.E.O. of a multi-national import/export business. He has traveled to almost every country in the world, but he refuses to go to Vietnam.