Johnny Cash, SFC Randy Hauser, and Small Town Breakfasts

Reflections on Veterans Day

Reforger 1988 A-23 SPC Law, PFC Eccles, SSG Rodriguez

I haven’t been everywhere like Johnny Cash, but I’m getting closer. Knoxville, Little Rock, Chicago, Spokane, Atlanta, Columbus, Nashville, Memphis, San Francisco, Gardner, Reston, Gainesville, Cincinnati, Rutland, Dallas, Tulsa, Las Vegas, Austin, Houston, Fort Worth, Boston, Tacoma, and Syracuse. It’s been a busy year and it’s not over yet.

I hate the flight delays, the long layovers, and the redeyes home from the coast. But I love the backroads, ballparks, and eggs over easy at a little place on the square that’s been there since the town began. The names cast in bronze on the plaques in every small town were somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s husband or somebody’s wife. They raised their hands, left home, and gave everything so that we could enjoy the eggs over easy in a coffee shop on the town square.

I was a kid from Long Island fresh out of a liberal arts college. I led a tank platoon with kids from all over the place. It’s been nearly forty years, but I remember most of their names. There was Specialist Riley from Michigan who ran close to a four-minute mile, PFC Turner from Hartford who hated the mornings, Specialist Green from maybe Oklahoma. Sergeant Coates from Maine who was impervious to the cold, and PFC Garcia from Los Angeles who was not. Corporal Rose from the Bronx who looked a lot like Willie Randolph. Sergeant First Class Randy Hauser from Indiana who for some reason rooted for Michigan and hummed the Michigan fight song while boresighting tanks. There was Specialist Law from California who wore a Skeletor mask in the driver’s compartment of his M1 and Privates Thomas and Eccles from Georgia, though it might have been Tennessee or Kentucky. There were the three Texans: Polk, Chandler, and Hannah. And then there were the lifers: Sergeants Legrand, Kelly, Doviak, Rodriguez, and Campos who kept me in line.

We trained hard, patrolled a hostile border on Christmas Eve, watched a wall come down and tuned in to Super Bowls on AFN that kicked off well past midnight. We set up cots in cinderblock barracks at Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels, although I don’t remember actually sleeping during the never-ending field problems.

We didn’t vote for the same people or root for the same teams. It didn’t matter. We played spades on all-night train rides to gunnery and border tours, bitched about the food, and put up with the weather. We were just a group of guys from everywhere who wore the same patch and saluted the same flag. Most fought in the desert while I watched on CNN. Some stayed longer to fight in a couple of the forever wars of the last thirty years. Riley, my driver, was pretty badly wounded in one of them and has had more surgeries than he can count. He’d do it again.

For me, Veterans Day is about memory.

It’s why old men wear baseball caps stitched with their unit names while standing in supermarket checkout lines.

It’s about standing in the line that stretches from Lexington Green through Shiloh, Tarawa, and Khe Sanh to the Korengal Valley with the men of 2^nd Platoon, Alpha Troop, 1^st Squadron, 2^nd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

Toujours Pret.