Over a period of a couple of decades, Gil Evachevski wasted a lot of time wracking his brain to figure out if he’d ever met Henry Toivo. He knew right from the beginning that he hadn’t known the kid by name, but he’d met his father, Heikki, at least once years before, so maybe he had met the kid. Gil really hadn’t been around much in the years Toivo was growing up, but he agreed with his father in law, the runaround the Army was giving was a shitty thing to happen to a Spearfish Lake kid.

Gil was a Spearfish Lake kid through and through.

His father, Daniel, was a World War II veteran of “D” Battery, 156th Artillery, the local National Guard unit. After the war, he went back to raising his kids, and, very soon after the war was over, he could spend the falls enjoying Gil’s career as a Marlin halfback, perhaps the best the school ever had.

The Marlins in those days were a football power in the league. Gil Evachevski was one of the reasons for a four-year unbeaten string; even as a freshman, he was a big kid, and fast, a big-man-on-campus who had it all. Off the football field, he was envied; he steady-dated the beautiful cheerleader Barbara Matson all through high school, and everyone pretty well had them figured out to be a permanent item.

Barbara’s father was a controversial figure in Spearfish Lake in those years, and she often found cheap shots aimed at her. It soured her on the town, even though a boy taking a cheap shot at her had to deal with Gil. Forty years later, the kid who eventually became the town police chief still walked with a slight limp, the result of a well-aimed kick to the kneecap after he’d made the mistake of badmouthing Gil’s girl at a school dance. It gave Gil a reputation of not being a man to cross, although he and the police chief eventually became good friends – but that was to be far in the future.

All through Barbara’s high school career, she frequently had to babysit for Carrie, her half-sister. Carrie was a cutie from the word go, and Barb and Gil and Carrie were often a threesome. Even when Barb was busy with something, Gil almost always found time to play with Carrie, and people looked at the storybook pair, and noted how well he got on with Carrie, and said Gil would make Barb a wonderful husband and perfect father for her children.

It was not to be. One of the few things that Barbara’s divorced father and mother agreed on was Barbara was going to college, and a good college at that. Even if money hadn’t been an issue – and this was before the days of liberal full-ride scholarships – college wasn’t really part of Gil’s plans. He asked her to marry him, anyway. She refused.

With the Korean War on, Gil knew he was going to be facing the draft if he didn’t go to college, so he enlisted in the Army, hoping to wind up in an artillery unit like his father, and be a little safer. The Army screwed up that plan, and Gil returned from Korea in the summer 1953 as a young sergeant, a highly skilled, experienced, and decorated infantryman.

Barbara was home from college that summer, following her brief, disastrous first marriage, living with her mother, and Gil, hoping against hope, asked Barbara again to marry him. By then, Barb’s taste in men had gone beyond sons of workers in plywood mills; she had her sights set on a potentially rich lawyer. She refused him again, and Carrie soon heard about it.

The nine-year-old Carrie took the bull by the horns, got on her bicycle, and rode over to the Evachevski house, where Gil was sitting around and wondering if there was any percentage in hanging around Spearfish Lake any longer. All of a sudden, the Army looked pretty good as a career.

“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” Gil told Carrie. “You’ve grown up a lot.”

Matson family members had a reputation for never being much on beating around the bush, and Carrie was no exception. “I heard Barb turned you down,” Carrie said. “She’s crazy.”

“I’m sorry she did,” Gil replied.

“I’m not,” Carrie said. “Don’t let her bother you. If you’ll wait for me to get out of high school, I’ll marry you.”

Gil laughed and thanked her for the offer. Then, they went outside, tossed a basketball around, and Gil took her out for some ice cream. At least they were still friends.

The next day, Gil packed his bags and re-enlisted.

Gil didn’t come back to Spearfish Lake until 1961. In the meantime, there had been a tour in Germany, and one in California, and, after he joined the Green Berets in 1958, one in Okinawa. They were busy years, but they were lonely ones, too. He was nearing the end of his tour in Okinawa when he heard in a letter from an old friend that Barb had gotten a divorce from her young lawyer, who turned out to like boys better than girls. She was back home again, living with her mother for a while. He hadn’t been home in years. Maybe it was worth one last try.

Barb was nice to Gil, but even at their first meeting, both of them could see the spark was long gone. He kind of offered to marry her once again, and she kind of refused.

That evening, he was sitting in the Spearfish Lake Bar and Grill, nursing a beer and conceding it had been a forlorn hope anyway, when a beautiful young brunette he didn’t recognize sat down across from him. “Damn it, don’t you listen to anything anybody tells you?” the vision of loveliness asked.

He frowned, blinked his eyes, and all of a sudden, bridged an awesome gap. “Carrie?”

“I told you not to let her bother you,” the glowing young Carrie said. “I told you to wait until I got out of high school, and I’d marry you.”

“You were only nine,” he said. “I didn’t quite believe you.”

“I meant it,” Carrie replied, and added, “I graduated last month.”

“You going to college?” Gil asked.

“The hell with college,” Carrie told him. “It didn’t help Barb.”

He looked her up and down. She had come out even prettier than Barb, much more like her mother, Helga. An important factor in combat was the ability to make quick, but critical decisions, and Gil had the decorations to prove he had the ability. He never gave it a second thought: “All right.”

Gil took Carrie to Germany on a honeymoon that lasted for three years. Right from the start, both they and everyone who knew them said it was a perfect marriage. What they also did have, in quick succession, were two kids, Jennifer and Garth, both born in Germany. Carrie had picked up a basic knowledge of German at her mother’s knee, and Gil had learned quite a bit of the language on a previous tour.

Even for a sergeant with his time in grade, housing on base in Germany was in short supply, so they rented a house on the German economy that was nicer than what they would have had on base, anyway. In those days, the exchange rate made living off base a bargain, and they quickly made German friends. They were able to have the best of both worlds, on and off base, but their social life wasn’t restricted to Americans.

What was, in a very practical sense, a three-year honeymoon came to an end in the summer of 1964. The war in Vietnam was reaching a fever pitch, and Gil, a Green Beret intelligence sergeant, had been lucky to avoid getting sent there earlier. This time, it couldn’t be put off.

They had a long leave, and plenty of time to move the young family back to Spearfish Lake. Carrie’s father and mother invited her and the young children to move in with them, but Carrie could sense it was a half-hearted invitation. Her father was then nearly 60, although he didn’t seem that old, and her younger brothers and sisters kept the house pretty well full, and two young children would stir it up even more. Besides, she was reluctant to give up the atmosphere of her own family that she and Gil had developed, so she set up temporary quarters in her father’s summer cottage at West Turtle Lake.

The next twelve months were terrible.

It wasn’t quite so bad at first, but it was all too soon before the days grew cooler, and the water was too cold for swimming, and there was less and less time when it was warm enough to enjoy being outside. The geese were already heading south, their honking as they passed overhead or stopped at the lake heralding the oncoming winter. With Labor Day the last summer visitors soon departed. Carrie, stuck with two small children in the little cabin, was lonelier than ever.

It was a long winter. Snow was on the ground before the deer hunters came, and it stayed all winter. The cabin wasn’t built for living in during the winter; it had no insulation, and it took both the oil stove and a wood stove and a fireplace to keep it warm enough to live in, even wearing woolens. It would have been impossible for her to cut enough wood to keep warm, so her father arranged for an occasional truck load of firewood and wood scraps from the plywood mill to burn, but feeding the fires was a never-ending job.

Her father saw to it that the road was kept plowed out, so she could get to town, and he, or her mother, or sometimes Frank, or one of her friends from town visited most every day. The nights were the worst, when the wind howled through the cracks in the summer cabin, making her feel more alone than ever, never getting used to missing the warm feeling of Gil beside her in their bed as she tried to go to sleep.

She wrote to Gil, every day, trying to keep a positive viewpoint, telling him she missed him terribly and counted the days until he would return, but she was never quite able to cover up how miserable she really was without him. Sometimes, though, it could take days to get the letters mailed, as howling snowstorms blasted the woods and the empty resort, and it would be a while before the driveway, or the county road out front would be plowed out enough for the mail to go through.

With agonizing slowness, day followed day, and each of the days was a little longer with the return of the sun to the snow-filled forest. Many days went without a letter from Gil, even though Carrie checked the mailbox every day that she could get to it; then, all of a sudden, three or four or more would come, all at once. Gil never said too much about what he was doing, although Carrie could read between the lines and see that what he was doing was hot and miserable and dangerous. Perhaps it was best that she didn’t know more about what he was doing, as she would then have even more to worry about.

Even the return of the geese in the spring, and the melting of the snow in the woods, and the breakup of the ice in the lake didn’t make the days go any more quickly, or lessen Carrie’s worry about her husband.

With spring, there came to be a few more people around. A crew arrived to build a new cottage, and she often took the children over to watch the men working or bring them hot coffee. On nice weekends there started to be visitors at the lake again, and there were people to talk to, and Carrie began to think there might be a chance that she might see Gil again.

One day in July, her half-brother Frank drove out from town, bringing a message for Carrie: “Get some clothes on, and I’ll take you to Camden.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Gil just called,” her half-brother said, “From San Francisco.”

We need not spend a lot of time discussing the scene at the airport when Carrie Evachevski welcomed her husband home from Vietnam, other than to note it was just as well that Frank had driven Carrie to the airport. Neither of the Evachevskis were very capable of keeping their minds on the road or their hands off each other enough to drive back to Spearfish Lake.

Many veterans of Vietnam have said, on reflection, that their trip home from the jungles was a little too quick; jet flight left little time to adapt to the real world.

Certainly, it was the case for Sergeant Gil Evachevski.

Gil was not one to talk about his war experiences. No one, not even Carrie, heard about the events of his trip home from Vietnam for several years, until one drunken night when Gil, Bud Ellsberg, and a few other Vietnam veterans welcomed home the last Spearfish Lake man to serve there.

The helicopter that took Gil out of his Special Forces camp up near the Cambodian border was hit by an RPG round as it barely got over the border of the camp. It crashed in a patch of jungle not far from the camp that had always been a problem area, and, on this day, the VC group that had fired the rocket-propelled grenade was holed up in that patch of jungle. Miraculously unwounded, Gil, the only survivor, had used the .50 caliber machine gun from the wrecked and burning chopper to fight off capture until ARVNs and Berets from the camp came to his rescue perhaps twenty minutes or three weeks later. Since Gil was supposed to be leaving, they poured a couple of shots of Johnny Walker Red into him while they called a dustoff for an ARVN whohad been wounded in the rescue. Gil rode the dustoff chopper down to Saigon, processed into and out of 5th Special Forces in about fifteen minutes, then grabbed a cyclo for Tan Son Nhut and the big freedom bird.

All in all, Gil was no more than forty-eight hours from fighting for his life in the burning chopper, ammunition exploding around him, to the loving arms of his wife in their bed in the cabin at West Turtle Lake. Even Gil admitted afterwards that, happy as he had been to get home, that might have been a little on the quick side.

Needless to say, Carrie was glad to see him. She had been looking forward to his return for a year, hoping against hope that he would make it home to her safely, worrying about him all the time, and now that he was back, she felt as if she were whole again. She was so excited to see him home that, in the first rush, she detected nothing wrong.

Gil, still suffering from jet lag and adrenaline overflow, slept fourteen straight hours that first night home. He woke up the next morning, to find Carrie still in bed with him, just laying there, quietly enjoying the sensation of having him in bed beside her again. It had been a long time.