Casualties of War by Daniel Lang

Author:Daniel Lang
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497683235
Publisher: Open Road Media

Eriksson’s tour of duty in Vietnam came to an end on November 28, 1967, a year after the patrol paid its visit to Mao’s hamlet. He thought of her as his plane, full of singing soldiers, took off from Cam Ranh Bay and he had his last look at the unhappy land below. “She was the big thing that had happened in the war for me,” he told me. His plane was a commercial airliner, the Army having chartered it for a flight to Fort Lewis, Seattle, from which point the men, all of whom were going on leave, would be on their own. Eriksson was bound for Minnesota, for a month at home before his discharge in the spring, but when his plane put down at Seattle he found that he was ten dollars short for the final leg of his journey. Fortunately, he ran into a fellow-Minnesotan at the airport, an artilleryman with whom he had gone off to Asia thirteen months earlier; the artilleryman, also homeward bound, unhesitatingly lent Eriksson the ten dollars. When the two men were aloft and sitting side by side, the artilleryman suddenly glanced at Eriksson with fresh interest and said, “Say, weren’t you the guy who turned in that patrol? That was a bum rap.” Smiling, Eriksson remarked to me, “We were thirty thousand feet up by then, or he might have asked for his money back.”

In Minnesota, Eriksson returned to the small apartment in Minneapolis where we were sitting, his wife having maintained it while he was gone. During his month’s leave, he was always with her and with relatives and friends and, in a way, Eriksson said, with Mao. Mao seemed to figure constantly in his thoughts, he said, which were concerned mostly with how he would earn his livelihood after he left the Army, the following April. The ideas that came to him, he said, had less to do with jobs than they had to do with life, and he attributed this to the incident on Hill 192. Sounding as though he felt he would be years mining its lessons, he told me, “I decided that whatever jobs I’d get, they weren’t going to be as important to me as the way I lived. That had to have some purpose. If it didn’t, then coming back from that patrol meant nothing.”

Recalling her husband’s arrival, Mrs. Eriksson said that when she went out to the airport to meet him, she could tell at once that there was a stronger kindness in him than when he had left. “The girl was very much with us when Sven came home that day, and maybe she always will be,” Mrs. Eriksson said. “We’d had to support each other in a new way after she was killed. I made sure I wrote to him every day, and in each letter I put a packet of Kool-Aid, so that at least his water would be tasty. He was upset and frustrated—it was in all his letters.

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