He was a big man with a bit more of a middle age spread than he’d care to admit, a balding head, and a beard that had been growing increasingly gray over recent years – all undeniable signs of retreating youth and advancing middle age. Perhaps it was the realization of the meaning of those signs he was daily seeing in the mirror which had begun to slow his headlong rush to the future and had him reflecting more and more on his past these days.

It was a raw, gray blustery day, which found him here in the rural Indiana countryside on this, another Veterans Day. He had not done anything today so public as marching in a Veterans Day parade, or serving as a member of a VFW color guard. That was wonderful for others, but it was not his way. As he made his way home from running some errands, he’d felt compelled to make a detour by the local Vietnam War memorial, before completing his journey. He had been drawn to this place on many occasions before. For it was a place of peaceful solitude and reflection – a quiet place to just take time to think back and to reflect on things that were, and on things that might have been. It had always been deserted when he had come here before, and it was no different this day than any other.

He approached the monument and knelt down in front, placing one knee to the cold, wet ground. Then, with bare fingers, he began to painstakingly dig a hole in the marble stones in front of the monument, so as to make a secure base for the small pot of flowers he had brought. The stones were compacted and imbedded in the half frozen earth, and it took quite some effort to dig them out. They assailed the skin of his hands, skin which had become unusually fragile of late, due to the effects of the diabetes. He felt a familiar stinging pain, as the skin yielded all too easily and yet another cut suddenly opened up in the crook of his right index finger. A bright crimson drop trickeled down and fell to the gound, stark against the white of the marble stones.

"Damn!" he cursed to himself. Was it the Agent Orange as some friends had suggested? Maybe, or maybe not. As far as he knew, he’d not been exposed. He’d never spent any time at all in the bush. He’d been one of the fortunate ones, rear echelon - "REMF", as they called it. Still, he had to wonder. The stuff had been touted as perfectly safe back then. "Hell, some of the guys who handled it regularly practically bathed in it!" he recalled. It was ubiquitous! How could anyone know for sure they’d not been exposed? He was reasonably certain it had been used to clear the brush surrounding the base where he was stationed. Perhaps one day he’d pay a visit to the VA hospital and have it checked out. "Maybe someday", he promised himself as he continued digging.

As he clawed away at the cold stones, a lethargic "daddy longlegs" spider, disturbed from its winter sleep, crept out from beneath the leaf litter and made a slow-motion getaway across the stones to the safety of the grass. It seemed to protest the man’s intrusion as it went. Normally repulsed by spiders, his reaction to the struggling creature here before him now, was instead, one of empathy. He stopped digging for a moment and watched with beneign interest, as the spider made good its escape. Stiff from the cold, each movement of its limbs seemed to require a supreme effort, as though it were caught in one of those dreams where you want to run from some unknown, formless terror, but you’re unable, because your feet are planted in concrete.

The man knew all too well about such dreams. Thankfully for him, the nightmares had been relatively infrequent. But when they did come, they were terrifyingly real. "Yeah, I don’t blame you!" he sympathized. I’d be pissed too!...rousted out in this miserable weather! Go in peace. I’ll do you no harm."

The cold, damp wind raked across the man’s back and went through the sweatshirt he was wearing, as though it were a piece of gauze. But though his own physical discomfort registered somewhere in the back of his mind, his attention quickly returned from watching the spider and focused once again on the task at hand. Finally, placing the pot in the hole he had dug, he pushed the stones up around it to keep it from toppling over in the wind. Then, satisfied the pot was secure, once again he rose to his feet, rubbing the ache in his knees.

It pleased him to see that the rust colored mums he had brought added some color to what had been an otherwise somewhat drab scene. He realized of course, the killing weather was fast approaching, and the potted flowers he had brought would not last more than a week or so at best. But at least they were here now, on this special day of remembrance. They would bear testimony to passers by that someone remembered and cared enough to stop here today. Surely, he thought, he couldn’t be the only one. His eyes searched the grounds in vain for some sign that others had been there today to pay respects. But if they had, he could find no evidence of it.

On the flagpole above his head, the American flag snapped and popped in the stiff autumn breeze, as the rope securing it beat out a staccato din against the metal pole. The man removed his hat, and with head bowed, stood there alone for a long while, shivering under the steely gray November sky, gazing at the stone which enumerated the names of the county’s war dead. He didn’t know any of them personally, yet he counted them all as brothers. Over and over he read the list of names and the dates of their loss. And as he read them, he tried to visualize the face belonging to each name, to reach out across the oceans of time and somehow touch with his mind what had once been the fabric of their lives.

The faces he saw were the faces of comrades, flush with the vigor and optimism of youth. They were men barely out of school, men who were to be cut down before their lives could begin to fulfill their promise. So many of them were from ‘67 and ‘68, the years he had spent over there. Sixty-eight had been the bloodiest year of the entire war, he recalled. Small wonder, he thought, so many of these names engraved here were from that time.

His mind wandered back to the days of his youth and the time he had spent over there, serving in a thankless war which, at the time, had been deemed at best, unpopular, at worst, evil. All of that had been more than three decades before – much more than a lifetime for far too many of his comrades. "Thirty two years!" he marveled to himself. "Where has the time gone?" And although he understood intellectually, the whimsical twists of fate and fortune, the "survivor’s guilt", or whatever it was, still troubled his heart. The self doubt, the questioning was still there. Had he given enough of himself? Was his sacrifice worthy in light of the sacrifice these men had made - the ultimate measure of devotion to their country? How is it he had he returned completely unscathed, when so many others did not?

Inside, he knew the answer to the last question. Ironically enough, he had survived, largely because he had volunteered for service, rather than waiting to be drafted. Yes, of course, it was an honorable thing to have done - to volunteer to serve his country. And part of his motivation for having done so was the knowledge that his own father had volunteered to serve in World War II. But he had also known at the time that to be drafted would mean he would almost certainly be sent to Vietnam with M-14 in hand, rather than with a clipboard and a pen, or a screwdriver and a wrench. With so many of his peers avoiding the draft by leaving the country, or simply refusing to serve, he had decided he would fulfill his obligation by enlisting. And he had also known that in so doing, he would greatly enhance his chances of surviving it and returning home.

Well, it had gone exactly as he planned. He had returned four years later, decades wiser and and a lifetime sadder, but with no physical wounds at all to show for his experience. The problem was, the more than 58,000 who weren’t as fortunate as he in that life or death lottery, had come home in bags and boxes, or had not come home at all. And the names of some of them were here before him, staring him in the face. "Such are the fortunes of war", he conceded, "that some must die and others live." And at that moment, dawned the simple understanding that what had been troubling him for all these years was not so much guilt for having survived, as it was deep regret and profound sorrow for the loss of those who did not. "Would that we all could have come home whole and alive, safe and sound!" he silently grieved.

From across the road came the sounds of car doors slamming and voices shouting, interrupting his reverie. It was the sound of people coming and going at the busy covenience store and gas station, which had been built there a few years before. Suddenly, he became painfully aware of the biting wind, and he realized that he was now, shivering violently. Having paid his respects, the aging war veteran at last turned away, faced into the teeth of the wind and trudged back to the pickup truck, where he had left it parked in the tiny visitor lot. "Rest in peace, my brothers", he muttered as he walked away. The wind caught his words as they fell from his lips and swept them across the green to the monument he had just departed, thence, to the rolling farm fields beyond. He stopped mid stride for just a moment, as he thought he heard his words return to him. "Go in peace, brother.", came the barely whispered response. "Go in peace, until the next time…"