The Vietnam veterans who had once gathered at places like the Spearfish Lake Bar and Grill to welcome their fellows home didn’t get together as a group for the four years following Henry Toivo’s memorial service. Which is not to say they didn’t take care of each other as the need arose, but it was a one on one thing, and there was really never the need to get together as a group.

For example, Ryan Clark was as good as his word to Steve Augsberg about a job at the plywood plant. In fact, Steve showed up at the plywood plant the Monday after their drunken evening at the Bar and Grill, catching Ryan a little by surprise. Times were a little tight right then, there had been a big layoff not long before, and there was no way in hell the union was going to let Ryan put Steve to work in the plant without a callback. But that didn’t stop Ryan very long.

Although Ryan was actually pretty junior among the management at Clark Plywood, and as personnel manager was much younger than other people at his level, there was a reason for it. Everyone knew that in time he was going to be running the place, if for no more reason than he had a block of stock; his father, who was the Chairman of the Board but not actively involved in management, had a larger one left to him by his father, Wayne. Brent Clark would most likely have a working majority when his stepmother, Donna passed away. It was a family business, in the end, and although the president was a paid manager, he definitely knew where the power was. So, he didn’t blink an eye when Ryan came to him and told him he was adding on a management trainee to work in expediting and production control.

The job wasn’t make-work, but it was scut-work, mostly nasty little chores that nobody else wanted to do and could pass off on Steve. And, there wasn’t much Steve could say about it. The job paid well, but it was dull, and worse, Steve could see it had no future, unless, of course, Ryan greased the skids for him. That didn’t set well with him, but without a college degree, it seemed like any chance of moving on to a position that really meant something seemed pretty slim.

Over a beer at the Pike Bar not long after the memorial service for Henry Toivo, Steve told Ryan what he thought about it.

“I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to have to be,” Ryan said. “But, there are things we can do about it. I can leave you where you are until we do some real hiring, and then put you out in the plant. The problem with that is it’d be a union position out there and your seniority would have to start from zip. Or, you can go to college, work summers, and I can keep your management seniority from last fall.”

“College?” Steve snorted. “How the hell am I going to go to college?”

Ryan smiled. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you about the GI Bill? Go to the right school, it’ll pretty well cover it, and working summers in the plant or the office will cover the rest.”

“I never thought about going to college,” Steve protested. “My grades weren’t that good, and people kept talking about how hard it is to get in.”

“Things have changed since then,” Ryan told him. “You go to the right school, and I don’t mean some diploma mill, either, and you walk slowly past the admissions office door with a letter from the VA in your back pocket, and you get admitted. As far as the grades – Steve, aren’t you more than three years older now than you were three years ago? I know when you were in high school you screwed around a lot. Hell, I did, too. Now, you know it’s worth it.”

“So, what’s the right school?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan admitted. “But classes don’t start till September, so we’ve got some time to work on it.”

Steve worked at Clark Plywood up close to the end of August, while he and Ryan did some research and some thinking. In the end, they settled on Weatherford College, a small school south of Camden. Ryan admitted it didn’t have the status of, say, State, but it was a well-respected private college that Steve could afford if he watched his money. It was also a rather conservative and religious school, which really wasn’t Steve’s cup of tea, but as Ryan pointed out, “You’re a hell of a lot less likely to be hassled for being a Vietnam vet than you would be at some place like State.”

It took a little getting used to. By now, Steve was four years older than most of the rest of the incoming freshmen, as least as the calendar counted, but, as Ryan had pointed out, much more mature than that. He wasn’t there to try out his wings for the first time; he was there to learn, and that made a world of difference. To his surprise, he pulled A’s and B’s his on his first midterm grades, where he’d had to work what he remembered as being harder to pull C’s in high school. It wasn’t that the work was easier – it was harder – but he was ready for it, now.

Steve was pretty much a loner at the best of times. It cost a lot to live on campus, so he got a tiny apartment in town, which saved money, but cut him off from a lot of the campus activities, but that was fine since he didn’t have a lot in common with the kids that surrounded him. There were a couple other Vietnam vets on the campus, and they soon found each other. They had an occasional beer, but didn’t get together much; like the vets in Spearfish Lake, it was only when needed, and that wasn’t very often. He mostly studied and went to class, and, when he wasn’t studying, usually wound up with a book or the TV. He dated a couple times that first year, but nothing serious; the young college girls were just as daffy as their male counterparts.

One of the things Clark tipped him off on was testing out of elective credits. Steve spent some time boning up, and took a bunch of tests. By the end of the first semester, he was a sophomore, and he was just shy of being a junior by the end of the year. That meant he didn’t have to waste time in filler, make-work classes, and could concentrate on useful classes. He majored in Business Administration at Weatherford, but the college had a deal worked out with a local community college for more trade-oriented classes, and Steve loaded up on them, as well, with the goal of picking up a second major in Production Engineering.

He stayed in touch with Ryan through the winter – not often, just an occasional letter or phone call, to let him know things were going all right. Though Ryan was a few years older and had a family of his own by that point, they became pretty good friends and hunting and fishing buddies, though there wasn’t a lot of that those first years.

Steve Augsberg came back to Spearfish Lake from college after his first year and went to Clark Plywood even before he went to his folk’s house, where he planned on staying the summer. “Just thought I’d let you know I was back, and ready to go to work,” he told Ryan.

“It’s like this,” Ryan told him. “I can put you back in the office, like you were last year. Or, I can put you out in the plant. I read the union contract over pretty good, and we can put management trainees out in the shop to get an idea of what goes on there. The money’s the same. What do you say?”

“The shop, I think,” Steve said, not looking forward to another summer of filing dull forms. “If I’m studying production engineering, I really ought to know what goes on out there.”

“I think so, too,” Ryan agreed. “Dad had me spend a year out on the floor before he let me come into the office, and I learned more that year than I would have thought. I wish the bozo we have in charge of this place had spent some time running machinery, and things would go a lot better.”

So, Steve spent an uncomfortably warm summer on the hot floor of the plywood mill. It wasn’t as hot or as uncomfortable as Vietnam, and Steve found he rather liked it. Ryan had passed orders to the Production Manager that he was to be kept moving around, doing as many different jobs as possible. Steve mostly worked as a fill-in for people on vacation, but he learned a lot about how the production flowed, and how one thing could affect another way down the line. He learned a lot about what made the other workers tick, as well. As Ryan had predicted, he learned a lot that he hadn’t expected to learn.

As the weather cooled and summer neared an end, Steve headed back to college with a fair amount of money in his pocket and the knowledge that he could handle the college work. He took a full load that year, adding on classes in accounting; he intended to get his money’s worth out of the college experience.

The year went by quickly, broken by only a few trips home to Spearfish Lake, one of them to head out to the Clark family deer camp near West Turtle Lake for a couple days deer hunting, accompanied by Ed Snyder and Joe Krebsbach. Both of them had made perfectly good adaptations back to society. There were only a few people in town who knew they had been field grunts in the ’Nam, and they didn’t even talk about it much at the deer camp. Their discussions mostly ran to Joe and his kids, Ryan and his kids, their jobs – Ed worked at Jerusalem Paper over in Warsaw, now, and had a little different perspective about working on a plant floor – and Steve’s college experiences, of course. Steve was only able to squeeze out three days before he had to be back to class, and he only got out in the woods a couple times. The one time he saw a deer he discovered he’d forgotten to load his rifle and the ammo was sitting back on the kitchen table. Once he got over his fury at himself, he realized it must mean he’d pretty well gotten over Vietnam to be able to forget such a thing.

He thought he was going to work in the mill at Clark again that summer, but to his surprise, Ryan had worked out a deal for him to work at Jerusalem Paper in Warsaw that summer. “You need to see how things are done elsewhere,” Ryan told him. “Figure on coming back here next year, though.”

It was a forty mile drive from Spearfish Lake to Warsaw every day, and the old toilet paper plant there had seen better days. It was hot, and, like any paper plant, it stank to high heaven, but Steve learned a lot about other ways wood was processed than making plywood and waferboard out of it, and again worked all over the plant, filling in for people on vacation.

Steve was technically a senior when he went back to Weatherford that fall, but was to remain a senior for two years while he finished up his various majors and the last of his GI Bill money. In the spring of ’78, he came home from Weatherford with a BS in Business Management, Accounting, and Production Engineering, and with a great deal of satisfaction. Four years before, he’d have been lucky and satisfied to get a job in the mill and stay there, but if things didn’t work out at Clark, he had experience and degrees that he could take anywhere for a lot more money than he’d ever dreamed. He felt immensely grateful to Ryan for pushing him a little bit and doing a couple things he didn’t have to do, but the knowledge and the experience and the degrees had been gained on his own.

As always, he checked in with Ryan when he first got into town, before he even headed home. “Good to see you back,” Ryan said. “With that pack of degrees, I figured you’d want to go somewhere other than this little mill.”

“If you don’t have room for me, I’m willing to,” Steve told him. “But I owe you a lot. More than you might think.”

“I said there’d be a place for you,” Ryan told him. “Go home, get rested up, and be back here at eight tomorrow morning with a suit and tie. There’s going to be a guy giving a presentation to you and me and some other people. I don’t want you to say anything until I ask you. OK?”

“Fine with me,” Steve agreed, wondering a little what was going on.

The next morning, Steve was in the conference room with Ryan and several other executives, a cup of coffee in his hand, listening to a presentation from some guy about his age about how the work flow on the milling floor ought to be reorganized. The guy had a know-it-all attitude that irritated Steve, especially since it was pretty clear the guy had never punched the “on” button on a milling machine in his life.

He got to the end of the presentation. “It’s good to hear your ideas,” Ryan said. “Steve, would you give us your impression of them?”

“Short version or long version?”

“Short version.”

“It’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“Why?” an older executive asked.

“There are bottlenecks on the floor, sure,” Steve said, “Especially at the premill, and in the curing. This would pretty much clear up the premill problem, true, but it’ll make the sanding a worse problem, and ball up the curing beyond belief. And, you’re looking at a hell of an investment in machinery. Beyond that, you’re looking at increased overtime hours.”

“Just who do you think you are?” the young man with an attitude said.

Ryan answered for him. “This is Steve Augsberg. He’s your replacement.”

“Replacement?” the man said, shocked. “What am I going to be doing?”

“Frankly, I don’t care,” Ryan said. “Whatever it is, it won’t be here.”

“Good enough,” the older executive said. “Steve, welcome to Clark Plywood.”

The meeting broke up, and Steve followed Ryan back to the former Assistant Production Manager’s office, to make sure no company property walked out the door with the fired man’s personal effects. It didn’t take long. Once the man was gone, Steve said to Ryan, “That was pretty brusque.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Ryan said. “The job opened up last winter, and we needed someone to fill it, since there was some useful stuff he could do that we needed done. But he was an asshole from the word go, and when he interviewed, he was all smiles about how cute he’d been about getting out of the draft, and how involved in antiwar demonstrations he’d been. So, I hired him to fill the position till you were available, because I knew I’d look forward to firing him. He just bought a house up here, too. Tough shit.”

“A little raw, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” Ryan smiled. “You remember back years ago, when we got together down at the Bar and Grill right after you came back from Vietnam?”

“I’ll never forget it,” Steve admitted.

“Do you remember Gil saying, ‘We’ve all been handed a bunch of shit about doing what we had to do, and someday, those people will have to eat that shit back?’”

“Of course,” Steve grinned, seeing what was coming.

“Well, we can check one off the list.”