A few days ago, I was sitting in the airport muttering to myself because my flight had been delayed several hours. To pass the time, I began to talk to another stranded passenger, who was seated beside me. We introduced ourselves; his name was Jake and he was on a business trip. I told him how I had become a police chaplain; then Jake told me a story about his life. He said that he grew up in a little town where life was good. At eighteen, he met the girl who would be his wife, and shortly before he volunteered to go to Vietnam, he gave her an engagement ring. Of course, as was true of most young men of that time, Jake admitted he had no idea of the reality of war and what being a soldier in the Vietnam War would be like, having grown up seeing John Wayne and the people he shot in movies dying painless and bloodless deaths. His father had served in World War II, but had spoken little to him about the war and the price he paid for being a part of it. Jake seemed to be an honorable man who loved his country, and believed in doing the right thing and protecting freedom.
Arriving in Vietnam, Jake was immediately deployed to be a part of a unit where violent encounters and death were common. As a part of that unit, Jake experienced much of life that was traumatic and horrific; events that day after day seemed to take pieces out of his heart and his soul. Jake saw his friends die violent and painful deaths, he saw children who were tortured or murdered. He didn’t specifically tell me what he had done, but Jake indicated that he had to do things that somehow violated his sense of right and wrong and good and bad and how one person should treat another. Jake said that as the days passed in Vietnam, he knew he was building walls around himself and could feel himself becoming hard. Pictures of bodies and blood and pain flashed in his mind so that even when he was physically away from the horror, he carried it all in his mind. Jake sighed as he remembered that deep and restful sleep became impossible. Jake had tried to drink away the pain, but, just as in taking aspirin, when the effects wore off, the pain returned.
When Jake returned from Vietnam, only his fellow soldiers understood what he had seen or experienced and how this horror had changed the very essence of who he was and how he dealt with the world. Jake married his sweetheart and had children, but sleep was rarely refreshing and he experienced a wall around himself when he spoke to his friends and family.
One summer, when Jake was in Washington, DC for a business trip, he visited the Vietnam Memorial. As had many before him, Jake began to search for the names on the Wall of the men from his unit who had died while fighting in the war. Frowning, Jake remembered that as he found the names on the Wall, a very strange thing happened; he experienced an unseen force that pulled on him in such a way that he found himself unable to leave the wall. Jake said he felt like a nail pulled to a magnet. “I couldn’t make myself go home”, he told me. “I abandoned my family and job. I guess I was a street person. I slept by the wall; I abandoned everyone and everything that had meant anything to me. I felt dead inside; I went through the basic things I needed to sustain life…I was a robot”.
One night, as Jake lay sleeping in his ratty sleeping bag close to the Memorial, he said he fell asleep… but I was tossing and turning. Soon Jake indicated that he began to dream. “In this dream, all the men I had seen die or dying in the war, were standing around me. I had vividly remembered them as they died, bloody and in pain; these guys weren’t injured or in pain. They were laughing and talking. I was lying in the sleeping bag looking up at them. They asked me, “Why are you here sleeping in a ratty sleeping bag beside the Memorial where our names are engraved?”. Jake frowned and remembered replying to them in his dream, “I don’t know why I’m here, I feel stuck. I can’t get away.”
“We aren’t here,” Jake said his buddies told him. “We have moved on. If you remain here, stuck, and pulled away from life, then our deaths were for nothing and meaningless. We gave our lives to give freedom and peace to others but you are not free.”
Jake started to get watery eyes as he remembered, “They all reached down and pulled me up out of the sleeping bag, dusted me off, shook my hand and said, ‘You should be the memorial to our life! Get out of here; go live your life. Be happy, love your family and friends, be good at your job. Laugh a lot. Freedom allows you to be the very best of who you are and who you can be. Give meaning to our death by your life’”.
Jake hesitated a minute, feeling maybe he had let me in on too much. I wanted to know what happened, so I kept encouraging him to tell me more. “I can’t remember exactly how this happened in the dream”, Jake said. “You know how strange dreams can get. Somehow each of my buddies decided to give me a gift of the very best of who they were. One gave his laughter, another gave his gift for solving problems, another gave his incredible ability to have numerous friends, others gave important things. The dream was weird. Somehow these gifts went into my heart”. Jake hesitated again, still a little embarrassed that he was telling me so much. “Then the guys told me to use their gifts so that I could be the best of who they were. They told me to honor them by becoming a memorial to their lives by being the best of who I can be.”
He remembered that after they said this, he woke up. “I was still laying there in my dirty sleeping bag. The dream was still in my mind; the meaning started to become clear. Then I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ The sun was rising and the light was shining on me. The whole world looked like it had changed. I walked away from the Memorial and threw the dirty sleeping bag in a trash can. I didn’t look back. I had figured out that my buddies weren’t in the memorial, they were in my heart”.
I asked him what happened when he went back home. Jake said, “My family and friends were angry and they didn’t understand what had happened to me. But the dream had changed me; I felt like I really did get all the gifts the guys gave to me. I worked really hard on my relationships with my wife and kids. I made new friends. I even changed jobs; I became a cop; I wanted to make the world a better place. I don’t know what happened, but that crazy dream changed my life.”
I asked Jake how he was different. He thought for a minute. “I’m happy. I love my family; I talk to my friends, I’m no longer obsessed with traumas in my past so that I lived in the past, even when I was in the present”, he told me. “As a cop, I still see things day after day that are violent and bloody and sad. But, I keep a picture of the Wall in my cruiser to remind me that my life is a living memorial to all my friends who died for freedom and justice and that I am not going to allow the horror and sadness in the world to make even a part of me die before my time.”
