After the Flag Has Been Folded by Karen Spears Zacharias

Author:Karen Spears Zacharias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

DADDY’S LAST INSTRUCTION to me was to stop crying because it upset Mama. I tried as best I could to do as Daddy had asked. But what he didn’t know then is that Vietnam would upset a lot of people. I learned at an early age to handle the burning things of life with mitts of silence. So for many years I didn’t talk about losing Daddy, about death, or Vietnam. I especially didn’t talk about such things with Mama. Yet, neither one of us could escape Vietnam’s far-reaching shadow. It was featured prominently in the nightly newscasts and in the daily papers. Political debates reached a feverish pitch once Fort Benning was selected as the site of the court-martial of Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley, Jr., for his role in the My Lai massacre.

Whenever Mama watched the newscasts or read the newspaper reports about the Calley trial, she’d gnaw on that worry gristle inside her cheek, over and over again. It was as if she had a mouthful of words she was chewing on but couldn’t quite spit out. I could tell she was troubled by what she was hearing and reading, but she wasn’t one to divulge her worries.

November 1970 was a month chock-full of news. A lot of it was election stuff. Jimmy Carter, a plainspoken peanut farmer who promised to be a “working governor,” handily earned Georgia’s top spot. It was the biggest Democratic victory Georgians had ever seen.

But not everybody in the city or state was rejoicing. Family members of the sixty-seven Georgia servicemen listed as missing in action or prisoners of war gathered in Atlanta and drafted a letter to the Viet Cong delegation at the Paris Peace Talks. They also urged their fellow Georgians to join in a “Write Hanoi” campaign, asking the Communists to release names of those being held captive, and they pleaded for the release of any prisoners who were sick or wounded. At Columbus High School several of my classmates wore engraved bracelets bearing the names of those men. I didn’t need a bracelet to remind me that our family was held hostage by what had already happened in Southeast Asia.

Some of the jury-selection proceedings in the Calley trial occurred on my fourteenth birthday—November 12—the day after Veterans Day.

Calley, then twenty-seven, was charged with murdering 102 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, in Quang Ngai Province of South Vietnam. Several other soldiers were also facing murder charges because the troops, under Calley’s command, reportedly killed as many as five hundred unarmed civilians during that same rout.

The highly publicized trial was never discussed in my classes at Columbus High. Most of the kids there were the children of civilians, yet many had fathers or grandfathers who’d once served in the military. Columbus has always been very patriotic and deeply loyal to the military community at Fort Benning. Churches and civic organizations make it a point to “adopt” young servicemen and to give them a family away from home.

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