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There’s a code of silence at the PTSD (post-traumatic stress
disorder) Clinic in East L.A. Whatever veterans say inside those walls stays
there. But a fellow Vietnam
veteran met me for lunch today on Whittier
Blvd., and he felt like talking. I listened. When
he finished telling me the story of that firefight back on February 8, 1967 —
and how it would come back to haunt him decades later — I cautiously asked him
if I could write about him — if I could share his story.
He agreed.
His name is Edward. I’d share his last name with you — he’s
OK with that — but that code of silence I mentioned gnaws on me. He turned 69
last month. He works the graveyard shift as a security officer at a railroad
yard. He feels safer in the dark — safer when he’s not around a lot of people.
And it gives him more time to spend with his 14-year-old daughter during the
day.
Bank in 1999, however, he was working the day shift as a
quality control inspector in a factory. He had successfully buried the memories
of that day in Vietnam
— the day a medic named Keith Campbell saved his life. He had buried the
memories of watching a bullet strike his rescuer in the neck. He had buried the
memories of a burst of more AK-47 bullets that instantly killed Keith Campbell.
But in 1999, Edward was playing with his kids in a park when a woman he’d never
known burst into his world. Medic Keith Campbell’s sister had finally fulfilled
her dream of meeting the man whose life her brother had saved, moments before the
medic, himself, fell to enemy bullets.
She wanted to look into the last pair of eyes her brother
had seen.
