In his column this week, Tom Treece talked about vivid memories from a moment years ago that are sometimes triggered by simple daily occurrences.
In Tom’s case, he referred to hearing on the radio that the Paris Peace Accord was signed, ending the Vietnam War. As a veteran of the jungles of ‘Nam, that moment was significant to him; it only takes a steaming cup of coffee to prompt the memories.
We all have those recollections. Whether of momentous times, like the death of a president or the explosion of a space shuttle, or small, private moments, they’re there, just below our conscious selves, ready to surface when stimulated.
That’s why Tom’s column resonated with me. Coffee brings back some of my own memories, and some of them also involve the Vietnam War.
Not that I was there on the front line. Far from it. Like Tom, I was in the generation that was called to fight another war on the far side of the globe that made no more sense than the current war in Iraq. But unlike Tom, I had a college deferment and then a high lottery number.
I’m neither proud nor ashamed that I stayed home while some of my friends fought and died, or fought and returned home changed forever. That’s just the way it was.
So what are my Vietnam coffee memories?
I started drinking coffee the summer during college when I worked driving trucks filled with peppermint from the farm fields to the processing plant. I had the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift – hence the need for coffee.
One night the trucks, about four of them, were lined up along the edge of a dark field. It was well past midnight, and we were waiting for the next truck to be filled by the harvester. One of the drivers, who was a couple years older than me and a distant acquaintance – he had been a star athlete in a nearby high school – had just returned from Vietnam.
I was in that dim state of consciousness just short of sleep when a man landed, as if dropped from the night sky, on the hood of my truck. I think I screamed, or nearly so, as he fired imaginary shots at me through the windshield from an imaginary gun in his hands. Then he leapt to the next truck, dispatched that driver the same way, and jumped again to the next.
It only took a few moments to realize that our athletic Vietnam veteran was having a terrible flashback, reliving the horrors of war at our expense. After finishing us off, he ran into the nearby woods and disappeared. I finished my cup of coffee.
No one was hurt. He never returned to the job. The memory should have dimmed to the far reaches of my mind, hardly a memory any more at all.
But sometimes when I drink a cup of coffee, when it’s particular refreshing or rewarding, I remember that first summer of Java, when I picked up a lifelong habit I don’t regret, whatever the latest study says about the evils of caffeine.
And that inevitably leads to that dark recollection of a Vietnam veteran caught up in his own haunted memories.
It’s not far from there to begin thinking about how many other young boys are returning from war today with their own tragic moments to relive.
