The Spearfish Lake Bar and Grill was almost empty. It was late in the afternoon, and it would get busy once the shift changed at Clark Plywood, but Steve Augsberg had decided to get an early start.

There wasn’t much else to do, anyway.

He was already on his second beer, but he wanted to get puking drunk again. He had looked forward to getting out of the army and coming home for three years, and when he finally made it, it wasn’t worth the effort. His old girl friend had gotten married to some son of a bitch 4-F who had never had to even worry about the draft. He’d known about it for a couple years, but knowing it and seeing her with a baby in her arms that wasn’t his didn’t make it hurt any less.

He would have liked to have gone out and partied with his old friends, to be welcomed home after being gone so long, but most of his friends were gone, or they had families, and they didn’t understand or didn’t care to.

He hadn’t even thought about getting a job yet, or about what he was going to do, but he’d already learned that jobs were hard to find this year.

It was not the homecoming he had looked forward to, and that made it hurt all the worse.

He heard the door open, and someone came in, but he didn’t look up; he just signaled the old girl behind the bar to bring him another one. In a minute, she brought him a draft, and he reached in his pocket to pay her.

“I’ve got it,” a voice next to him said, waving the bartender off.

He looked up to see Mr. Evachevski, the man who had bought the appliance store just before Steve left for the army, what now seemed like a lifetime before.

He looked around; there were half a dozen others surrounding him as he sat on the bar stool. While he recognized the faces of a few, the only faces he could put a name with was Coach Hekkinan’s, and Mr. Ellsberg’s. He had played football in high school and had been a bag boy at the Super Market.

“What do you want?” he asked, a little sullen and a maybe even scared a bit more than that.

“We want to buy you a beer, kid,” Coach Hekkinan said. “Doesn’t look like anyone else wants to, but we do.”

“You come and sit with us,” Evachevski said, in a tone that was just short of being a direct order.

“I’m not in the mood for any lectures about being a good little boy,” Steve replied.

“So you’re not going to get one,” Ellsberg said.

More than a little confused, Steve got up and sat down at the big table with the group. Evachevski nodded, and the old gal behind the bar brought a couple of pitchers over to the table.

Mr. Ellsberg sat down next to him, and poured him a glass. “Coming home wasn’t as great as you thought it would be?” he asked.

“Certainly wasn’t,” Steve said in a whisper, “but you wouldn’t understand that.”

“You know everybody here?” Coach Hekkinan asked.

“Some of you,” Steve replied, still sullen.

“Then you don’t know that we’re all people who would understand,” Ellsberg said, sticking out his hand. “221st Aviation Battalion, mostly 1962. Welcome home, Steve.”

Steve shook his hand. Across the corner of the table, Evachevski reached out his huge paw. “Gil Evachevski, 7th Special Forces Group, ’63 and ’64. Welcome home, Steve.”

“Seventh Cavalry, 1965,” Coach Hekkinan said. That was a surprise; Steve had never suspected that he had even been in the service. “Welcome home, Steve.”

One by one, he shook their hands.

“Ryan Clark, Big Red One, 1968. Welcome home, Steve.”

“Joe Krebsbach, Tropic Lightning, 1969. Welcome home, Steve.”

“Mark Gravengood, 82nd Airborne, 1967. Welcome home, Steve.”

“Bud said you ain’t gonna get a lecture,” Evachevski said. “But we want to give you an invitation. It’s real simple. None of us here are what you would call REMFs. There’s not a lot of us in this town who can say that, but we’ve all spent our share of time out beyond the green line. We have to stick together and help out each other when we can.”

Clark spoke up. “Get rested up, get your head together, and when you get ready for a job, come on out to the plywood mill and see me.”

“I talked to the prosecutor this morning,” Bud said. “He says that if you maintain your cool, he’ll drop the charge.”

Steve shook his head. “Why are you guys doing this?” he said finally.

Gil looked hard at him, then topped off his beer glass. “We’re doing it because no one else will do it, and somebody ought to,” he said. “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. Until then, there’s nobody else but us, and that includes you, so we’ve got to stick together. Tonight we’re going to sit here and get drunk with you, and all the shit you’ve taken you can get off your chest with maybe the only people in town who will know what you’re talking about, and for sure the only people who will care about it.”

Several hours later, Carrie Evachevski and Kate Ellsberg finished driving the last of the drunks home. Gil was snoring peacefully on the couch when Carrie got a call from Kate.

“I hope we don’t have to do that again,” Kate said.

“With any kind of luck, we won’t have to,” Carrie replied, thinking back several years. “I’ve been doing this too long, and I think that’s the last one.”

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

LOCAL EMPLOYMENT STILL TIGHT

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

Though the local economy is still sluggish, and factory orders are still in the grip of the recession and the energy crisis, there are some signs that things are beginning to pick up a little.

Several companies have reportedly called laid-off workers back, including Spearfish Lake’s largest employer, Clark Plywood.

Ryan Clark, personnel manager at Clark Plywood, said early this week that the company is looking forward to future expansion as the economy recovers, and that new hiring is expected to start when all laid-off workers have been called back.

Clark Plywood is doing a small amount of new hiring, as well; Mr. Clark said that a new management trainee had been added to the company’s staff this week.

It was just as well that Frank had driven Carrie to the airport to welcome her husband home from Vietnam, because neither of the Evachevskis were capable of keeping their minds on the road 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; indeed, no one, not even Carrie, heard about the events of his trip home from Vietnam for a good ten 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 had come to take Gil out of his Special Forces camp, up near the Cambodian border, was hit by an RPG round as it barely got within sight of the camp. It crashed not far from the camp in a patch of jungle that had always been a problem area, and on this day the NVA group that had fired the rocket-propelled grenade was holed up in that patch. Miraculously not wounded, 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. Because 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 that had been wounded in the rescue. Gil rode the dustoff chopper down to Saigon, processed into and out of Seventh 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 thirty-six 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 their cabin at the West Turtle Lake Club. 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 overload, slept fourteen straight hours that first night home. He woke up the next morning to find Carrie still in bed with him, just lying there, quietly enjoying the sensation of having him in bed beside her again. It had been a long time.

That first morning, they talked for a long time, and Carrie and Gil worked on getting reacquainted with each other. After a while, they got up and went over to Commons for some breakfast.

Commons had long been a dream of Helga’s; a place where healthy, vegetarian food could be served regularly to the members of the club. Wives visiting the club wouldn’t have to be bothered with fixing meals for the family, but could have the full benefit of the club’s other activities. It was one of the club’s popular attractions.

Helga had pushed for such a place from the beginning, and community dinners had been a West Turtle Lake Club custom from the first year, but the cafeteria had lost money right along. It was many years before the club could grow to the point where the Commons was big enough to be operated three meals a day, with snacks available at other times, and now, though there was no charge for meals over and above the basic membership charge, the cafeteria now made money.

Carrie and Gil sat down, had a breakfast of granola and herb tea, and Gil was able to greet some old friends he had made at the club the summer before.

Even in Commons, Gil was a rather strange sight. He had spent a year out in the hot tropic sun, and he was heavily tanned on his upper body, absolutely brown from the sun.

From the waist down well, let us just say that there had been no opportunity to work on his tan on those parts of him for a year now.

Nevertheless, feeling the need for some exercise and some unwinding, the suggestion was made that Gil and Carrie join her mother and father for a round of golf. They accepted, and soon they were out in the midday sun, working their way around the golf course. Gil had never been much of a golfer up until that time. He had not had a club in his hand in a year, and he found he had developed a rather awesome slice.

He also developed the West Turtle Lake Club granddaddy of all sunburns, restricted to his lower half, and especially some rather sensitive areas there. It was painful, and it also postponed Carrie’s planned welcome home. For the next few days, Gil’s outdoor activities involved soothing lotions and restrictions to shady areas.

It was then, as they just sat and talked and got to know each other again, that Carrie detected something in Gil. Nothing wrong, but a change, a wariness where he had been open; a quiet, where there had been laughter; restraint, where there had been openness.

She wasn’t sure she liked it but was sure she didn’t like the change.

As the days passed, and Gil’s sunburn healed, Carrie became more and more sure that something had changed.

She had suspected right along that his time in Vietnam had been more difficult than he ever let on to her, but over the years, she was to pick up more little bits and pieces and innuendos that made her more and more sure that she was very lucky indeed to have him home with her again.

One afternoon, as Gil and the kids took a nap, she decided to talk about it with her mother.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Helga said. “When your father got home, I wasn’t altogether sure that he was the same man that I had married. Of course, we hadn’t been married very long when he left to go to Italy, and we still had to do a lot of getting to know each other when he got back. I mean, we were all taken with the war then, and he was this handsome man in a uniform, and even out of a uniform, and I fell in love with him. But, when we first moved up here, he was so serious, I wondered if he was still the same man I married.”

“Was he?”

“Well, he was, and he wasn’t,” Helga said, “but he was my man, and I still loved him. And I still do.”

“Well, I still love Gil, but something’s changed.”

“Something changed in your father, too,” Helga said. “He still gets together with his old army friends and they talk about hunting and fishing but never the war, unless maybe it is something funny that happened to somebody while they were training here in the States. That’s one place where you are lucky with Gil.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you must remember, when you fell in love with Gil, he had already been through a war, and he maybe knew something about what to expect.”

As Carrie walked back to her cabin, she couldn’t help but think about that day, a dozen years ago, when she had first asked him to marry her. He was just back from Korea then, and it had been a long time, but the Gil that she remembered as a nine-year-old wasn’t the same Gil she remembered as a seven-year-old, either.

When she got back to the cabin, she found Gil sitting in a lounge chair, on the shade of the porch. “Went over to have a talk with Mom,” she reported.

“Any interesting gossip?” he asked, more from courtesy than from interest.

“Not particularly,” she said. “You know, I was just thinking about when I asked you to marry me.”

“You took me by surprise,” he said. “When I went down to the bar for a burger and a beer, I got more than I expected.”

“Not then,” she said. “The first time, when I was nine, and you’d just gotten back from Korea.”

He sat back and looked out across the lake for a moment. “You know, I remembered that for all these years,” he said, finally. “I thought about it a lot, while I was out in the boonies this last year. I came home, and I was really down from Barb turning me down, and not getting any sort of a welcome home, and knowing that no one understood or cared about what I had been doing. And there you were, just a kid, but you had time for me, to play basketball with, to laugh and shout and giggle and have ice cream with. It made me feel like a human being again. It was the nicest afternoon I had after I came back from Korea.”

“I can throw a basketball a lot better, now,” she said.

He smiled; it was that wonderful old Gil smile that she remembered. “I’ll bet I can still beat the pants off of you,” he said. “That is, if you had any pants on.”

Gil may have been a lot bigger than she was, but she was quicker. Neither of them had shot a basketball in years, but they spent a couple of hours out on the court, laughing and playing with each other, shooting baskets and keeping score sometimes and sometimes not; sometimes, she outshot him, and sometimes, he outshot her, and neither of them cared.

As the afternoon wound down, they got the kids from where they had left them in the club nursery, got everyone dressed, and went to town for ice cream, and the first decent steaks either of them had seen in over a year. On their way back to the cabin, Gil stopped and picked up a bottle of brandy, and once they got the kids in bed, they sat out on the porch, looking across the quiet lake and getting a little tiddly, then went to bed and made love, and cried a little out of happiness that they were together again, and made love again.

Gil was home. All was right with the world.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, April 17, 1966

BIRTH ANNOUNCED

Mr. and Mrs. Garth Matson proudly announce the birth of their third grandchild, Brandy, to Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Evachevski, of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The baby, which was 7 lb. 6 oz. and 20 inches long, joins her sister Jennifer and her brother Garth.

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