Carl Hitchens - tracking the self …
Carl Hitchens - tracking the self …
2017
“This is Jeffrey Hoagland the statistic, whose life and testament are summed up in the terse, white-chiseled letters of his name on the black marble relief of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. He is found at Panel 11W—Row 046, one of the 58,220 killed in the Vietnam War. Just like the song “19” reports, Hoagy died before his twentieth birthday, as did 11,464 others. Sixty-one percent of all those killed were younger than twenty-one.
Jeffrey and the others mentioned here all died short of the average infantryman’s age of twenty-two—not nineteen, as claimed by the song—but before the average death age of 23.1 years. Unlike some 1,720 American casualties whose status is unknown, Jeffrey has been accounted for: for his family, for his friends, for historians.
Hoagy was my friend, my fellow Marine. He was not some dried-up, lifeless statistic to serve as fodder for political debate, but a flesh-and-blood human being who beat the bush with me and watched my back, as I did his. In fact, Hoagland once practically crushed my back, pushing me down with all his weight into the Vietnam dirt, when I tried to rise from a prone position during an enemy ambush. I wanted to see where the fire was coming from. Hoagland wanted to stop me from taking a round between the running lights.
“Keep your f–ing head down, Hitch!” he said. He won the discussion. I’m here today, because of that. But Hoagy is on the Wall in DC, succinctly described without mention of his medium height, sandy hair, and amber eyes that twinkled with bratty mischievousness.
It took thirty-five years to find out that my friend had perished. He was alive and kicking the last time I saw him. There was still the possibility of reconnecting with him in the future, in or out of the military. But that chance had ended on April 24, 1970, in our old haunts, Quang Nam province.” — Excerpt From: Carl Hitchens. “Sitting With Warrior.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/sitting-with-warrior/id489876331?mt=11
---------------
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
The Vietnam War
9/20/17
Hoagland
Tainter
Hitchens
Wheeler
Juan
Mora