The Henry A. Toivo Post 17 of the American Veterans of the Vietnam War never got very big, but then, it was never intended to be. “We’re not in the bar business,” Hekkinan told people repeatedly. “We don’t hold fish fries, and we don’t lobby for a bigger share of the pork barrel. We’re here to respect and honor the people who served. Period.”
For that matter, the AVVW never got very big on a national scale. It was a good idea, but it was too early; too many Vietnam veterans were still trying to cover up the fact that they had done their duty as their country had asked them to. Being a Vietnam veteran was still a thing to be shameful of, at least in many people’s eyes.
Things did get better, and they got noticeably better when the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was dedicated in Washington, when a lot of veterans came out of the woodwork and saw they didn’t have to take shame in their past any more. Several of the Spearfish Lake veterans made the long trek to Washington for the dedication. They were proud to see they were not alone, they could take pride in having done their duty once again. All of them agreed it was eerie to stand in front of that awesome black marble wall and reach out to touch Henry Toivo’s name with their fingertips. But, when the AVVW post formed in Spearfish Lake, that was still far in the future.
It was clear from the beginning it was going to take more than the handful of guys who had gotten together in Hekkinan’s back yard to even get a group who could do memorial squad duties. The only way they were going to be able to accomplish that was going to be to reach out to some of the other Vietnam veterans in the area who hadn’t been in field units.
“I don’t want to even hear someone think the term ‘REMF,’” Hekkinan cautioned the group. “Those guys share an important thing with us: they did their duty when they were called. They didn’t run off and hide. Some of them even got shot at more than some of us did. You get right down to it, we were all in it together.”
And, a few did join, but they were never more than a larger handful, which was enough to accomplish what they’d set out to do. Still, Hekkinan was disappointed that he hadn’t gotten more response, and he commented on it to George Webb over breakfast at Rick’s Café one morning.
“Not surprising,” Webb told him. “It’s not just you Vietnam vets. People don’t join like they used to. It used to be there were a lot of service organizations and clubs and fraternal organizations in this town, in any town. Go down to the Record-Herald and look at any issue from back when I first worked here, back in 1955. It’s full of club meetings, club news from organizations that are long gone. Like, say, Odd Fellows. Gone, now. Knights of Pythias, gone. Masons, gone. Eagles, gone. Woodsmen, gone. Grange, well, not gone, but damn near. Lions, maybe six members. Rotary, gone. Kiwanis, that’s all businessmen, and maybe a dozen. I don’t even go any more. VFW, gone. Amvets, hanging on by their fingernails. Post, and I know what you think about them, less than half what they were ten years ago. It used to be that people belonged to several clubs, and were at meetings several nights a week. Now, everybody just sits at home and watches TV. You’ve done well to have the few you have.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Hekkinan said after hearing Webb recite his list. “But we’ll just have to try and keep hanging together for our own sakes, and take care of each other.”
Most of the time there wasn’t a lot of taking care of needed, but there were occasions.
The remaining members of the original group all felt a duty to help take care of Janet Mackey, Glenn’s widow. She had a great deal of difficulty adapting to Glenn’s loss, but she wasn’t a person to ask for help, although it had been made clear to her that all she had to do was ask. But, the guys did what they could.
For example, for the next two years, every time Bud fired up his riding lawnmower, he drove it up the street and mowed Jan’s lawn, always watching carefully for drunken Post members, of course. In the winter, he took his pickup and plowed out her driveway. She thanked him repeatedly and offered to pay him, but he demurred, telling her Glenn would have done the same thing, the other way around.
Others of the group helped Jan in other ways. Both Steve Augsberg and Ed Snyder were still single, and both dated her. In the beginning, it was very friendly, and often a threesome; on occasion, one would watch the kids while the other took Jan bowling or to a movie. Without a word of discussion passing between them, they agreed if Jan should start showing interest in either one of them, the other would back off. As it turned out, Jan and Ed wound up getting close, and Steve was the one who backed off, but was happy to serve as Ed’s best man when he and Jan got married about two years after Glenn’s death. They all remained friends, but Ed did have to mow his own lawn. Bud still plowed the driveway, but then, he had a pickup truck with a blade and Ed didn’t.
The snow plowing didn’t last long; Ed got an offer to transfer to the Jerusalem Paper plant in North Carolina, to assist in developing a new, high-tech line. Not without some misgivings, he, Jan and the three kids – they now had one of their own, along with the two she’d had with Glenn – decided to take them up on the deal. They were tired of the Spearfish Lake winters, anyway. Ed did get home once in a while, and saw the guys now and then.
That was not the only time one of the guys reached out to help another.
Joe Krebsbach had a drinking problem. It wasn’t all that bad when he got back from ’Nam, or maybe they didn’t notice it as much since they all drank a little more in those days, but as others backed off with maturity it got worse with Joe. Finally, it reached the point where his marriage got shaky.
It was Mark Gravengood who finally took the situation in hand. He got Joe off to one side one evening, and told him, “Joe, I’ve got a drinking problem. I’ll go to AA if you’ll go with me.”
“Bullshit you’ve got a drinking problem,” Krebsbach replied, a little hot and with about half a load on at the time. “I know you too well. You’re on the board of the Baptist Church, and four beers a month is a heavy one for you.”
“That’s the point,” Mark smiled. “To a bunch of Baptists, four beers a month is a problem.”
That got Joe to laughing, and Mark soon got him to admit he knew he’d been drinking too much but was scared to go to AA by himself. It wasn’t so much that he was scared of admitting it, but scared of admitting the problem stemmed from some of the things he’d seen and done in the war, and people wouldn’t understand. “I’ll be there,” Mark said. “Maybe no one else will understand, but you know I will.”
For the next two years, Joe and Mark went to AA meetings, three times a week at first, but after Joe had been on the wagon for a while, it tailed off to two, and then to one. After Joe had been on the wagon a while, he told Mark he didn’t need to put up the fiction any more, and didn’t need to go with him, but all Mark said was, “Hey, if it was the other way around, you’d do it for me. It’s like Gil said years ago: no one else is going to look out for us, so we have to look out for each other.”
Mark did cut back on the meetings after that, but still went once in a while, and never touched a drop, even at home, just to support his friend. He kept it up until Joe got a job offer down in Decatur that was just too good to pass up, but kept in touch even then, and Joe managed to stay on the wagon.
Mark didn’t. He resumed his drinking problem, but cut it way back, to maybe two beers in a heavy month. He was off the church board by then, anyway.
As the seventies became the eighties, problems like that became fewer and fewer, and helping each other out involved things like occasionally getting together to help someone shingle a roof. Augsberg bought a bass boat and spent a lot of time fishing, and most of his buddies began to figure he was going to become a confirmed bachelor. Hekkinan stayed the Marlin football coach, and had the pleasure of coaching two of his kids, who became good solid football players.
Gil Evachevski had his oldest daughter, Jennifer, graduate from high school in 1980 and head off to college, in Nashville, of all places. A little to Gil and Carrie’s surprise, it turned out she went there less for a college education than to get into the music business, and she did well. Less than a year after graduation, everyone had heard a copy of her first solo album; one cut on it, a real honky-tonkin,’ cheatin’ and drivin’ pickups song with lots of steel guitar and mandolin called Smoke-Filled Room got well onto the country charts.
Mark Gravengood, who worked for the phone company, had been a private pilot since junior high. With and his wife, Jackie, he bought a crashed sailplane and rebuilt it in the back of the sign shop she ran out of the steel barn behind their house. Mark invited a lot of people out to the house over the years to view the stars through the biggest telescope in the area, which he and Jackie had built. Mark liked gadgets; not long before Glenn was killed, he’d built an Altair 8080 from a kit – it was usually considered to be the first of the home computers. It was pretty primitive, and Mark could never get it to do much, but when Apple IIs became available he had the first one in the region, and it stayed the first in town. As home computers slowly became more popular, Mark became acknowledged as the local expert on them.
In general, by the late seventies, they all had put the war of a decade and more pretty well behind them and had gotten on with their lives, which were fairly placid.
Everybody but Bud, that is. Though the war problems were behind him, the late seventies and early eighties were to bring big and unexpected changes to his life, along with challenges he’d never dreamed could happen.