HUE, ‘68

He’d been really quiet for days, since the trip to the doctor’s office. Who could blame him? The x-ray didn’t lie. No need for a medical degree to understand what the gray spots scattered like buckshot on the computer screen meant. Small cell carcinoma. If that had only been the worst of it.

“Distant,” the doctor had said. Meaning? The cancer had spread far and wide. Meaning? Best get your affairs in order, or words to that effect. Maybe six months. Maybe.

At the age of fifty-eight, with slim prospects of seeing fifty-nine, my friend Dickson Pettigrew was fatalistic.

“A couple of packs of cancer sticks a day for forty years? What the hell can you expect?”

Dixie and I grew up together on the same street, houses side by side, born exactly a month apart. Now I say “Dixie” because nobody called him by the name on his birth certificate. Even his mother gave up as far back as I can remember, and I can remember as far back as our first day at school in 1956.

The nickname was fitting enough since we lived in Folkston, a little Georgia town of forty-five hundred so far south as to practically be in Florida. Dixie, alright. More stars and bars than stars and stripes.

The disease had been taking its toll on Dixie. Normally he stood six-two, 220 pounds. But he’d been losing weight for weeks and to my eye seemed to have shrunk. And he’d developed a cough which sometimes wracked him from head to toe.

“It’s a motherfucker, this shit,” he’d gasp. For my part it was a helpless damned feeling watching a friend go through it, I can tell you. And I was the only one still close to him. He’d been divorced for ten years and never caught on with another woman. No kids. Both his parents were buried in the town cemetery; and his only sibling, a younger sister, lived in Alaska and hadn’t had anything to do with him for years. He never even bothered to call to give her the news.

But the two of us had stayed close, coming back home to Folkston and settling down after our hitches in the service. It was 1967; we were fresh out of high school, and since neither of us was headed to college, we knew Uncle Sam would get interested in us real soon. Rather than wait for the draft notice to show up in the mailbox and then get shipped off to ‘Nam as a grunt, I enlisted in the Navy. Well, I ended up over there anyway, on a carrier in the South China Sea. Of the two of us, Dixie was always the more gung-ho, so he signed on with the Marines. “Gonna waste me some gooks,” he drawled on the day he headed west to Camp Pendleton.

Now, this is a good time to say something else about Dixie, his reference to “gooks” and all. My friend had his good qualities for sure; but on the other side of it he was a racist, dyed in the wool, which I suppose isn’t a major shock given how and where he was raised. Me? I wasn’t the same. I had no special bone to pick with Blacks. Got along well enough. Live and let live, you know? Not Dixie.

After he’d been in boot camp a couple of weeks, I got a letter from him. He bitched and moaned about the usual things, but saved his most bitter complaints about his fellow Marines of a different color.

“If I never lay eyes on another nigger in my life it’ll be too goddamned soon.”

That was Dixie.

War is a different animal for every man who’s thrown into it. In my case, I did two tours, about a year in all; and apart from a few mishaps on the flight deck where I was assigned, the drama was at a minimum. Pretty much a skate and I was back stateside.

Not so for my buddy. He was with the Fifth Marines near Hue, about forty miles south of the 17th Parallel that split North and South Vietnam. It was the old Imperial City, if you know anything about the country’s history. More to the point here, it was the scene of some seriously bloody fighting in early ’68, just a couple of months after Dixie deployed there. Again, if you know some history about the war, then you know that was the time of the Tet offensive when the enemy launched a massive surprise attack on the south, and Hue was right in the middle of it. Both sides lost a lot of men before it was over and the good guys were back in control. For Dixie, with a load of shrapnel in his back, it meant his tour was over. He was shipped home with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.

Out of the hospital and back in Folkston, people made a big deal out of their wounded medal winner. He was treated like some kind of hometown John Wayne hero—a parade with the high school band, a citation from the mayor and all the free drinks he wanted at the local watering holes.

You might think he would have eaten up in all the attention. Just the opposite. He shrank back into himself, at least where ‘Nam was concerned. Never talked about what he’d been through, not even with me. And I let him alone. Like I said, war’s a different animal for every man, so why would I pry?

Always handy with cars, Dixie went to work for Bill Timms at his garage while I got my license, set myself up selling insurance, married my high school sweetheart and raised three kids. The war was long forgotten as the years rolled by.

That changed a couple of weeks after Dixie’s diagnosis.

“I got to get to D.C.,” he announced on a Sunday afternoon as we drank beers on his front porch.

“D.C.—as in Washington?”

“Yeah.”

“What for?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

“I need to go to the Wall…the Vietnam Wall.”

“Why?”

“I just need to get there, okay? Can you help me?” There was real urgency in his voice, and considering his condition it was understandable.

“Of course. I’ll take you myself,” I replied.

I cleared my schedule at the office the next day and on Tuesday we took off. We made the trip by car because Dixie was no fan of flying. Since it was nearly seven hundred miles and Dixie tired easily, we spent the night midway through North Carolina and finished the next day. The whole way he never brought up why the trip was important, so like I’d always done over the years where the war was concerned, I let him be. Instead, he spent most of his time—when he was up to it—talking about his two favorite subjects, bass fishing and the Atlanta Falcons.

It was mid-afternoon before we reached our hotel across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia and checked into a room.

“What say we go to the Wall tomorrow morning,” Dixie said, “after I recharge the old batteries, you know?” He didn’t need to say a word. His face, ashen and drained, told me everything.

The memorial is open around the clock and Dixie wanted to get there early before the inevitable crowds. So, in the dim light just before 5:30 we arrived. I’d never been to the wall, but I was struck right away by what friends had said, that it was a somber place you treated with reverence, where you spent your time in reflection and didn’t speak much above a whisper. That atmosphere was all the more so on the morning Dixie and I were there because the day was dawning overcast with a shroud of fog crowding low among the trees.

“We gotta find a name,” Dixie said, beginning to wheeze with the effort of walking up from the parking lot. At the start of the memorial walkway was a glass case protecting a thick book with curled, well-thumbed pages containing all the names on the wall and where each could be located.

“Which one are you looking for?” I asked, waiting while Dixie was wracked by a coughing spasm.

“Spencer,” he said, heaving to catch his breath. “Leroy Spencer.” I leafed through the book, found the right page and let my finger run down the list.

“Here it is—Spencer, Leroy J.”

“That’d be the one.”

“Panel 42, Row 29.”

Slowly we began to move along the black granite slabs engraved with the names of the fallen grouped by the year they were killed. When we reached panel 42, Dixie waved toward a stone bench on the other side of the flagstone walkway.

“Let’s park it a minute,” my friend said. “I need to tell you why we’re here.” He sat wearily and bent forward, hacking again. The moist air wasn’t helping. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and began.

“I never talked about ‘Nam much.”

“And I never wanted to ask. Figured it was just too painful.” Dixie nodded.

“Yeah, that it was . . . that it was, but not just for what you might think. I mean, getting shot up and all. There’s more to it.” Here he paused for a long moment as his eyes turned toward the wall. “It was just about dawn, early February, ’68, I think. Our platoon was two or three klicks northwest of Hue. Well, the word came down that Charlie was on the move our way, so my squad got the call to move out. A recon patrol, nothing we hadn’t done dozens of times. We fanned out—two fire teams to the west and the one I was in to the east.” His speech was halting as he fought to put memory into words. “It was a lot like today—the weather—only hotter and more humid, and we were moving through the bush. That made it worse, sweating our asses off with the heat and nerves, you know? Was some gook gonna jump you? Or, were you gonna trip a mine or fall into a punji pit? I mean in country, man, your nerves were always on edge, and for some reason that morning, mine were really fried. So, me and this other guy—Leroy—were together, maybe twenty yards from the rest of the squad. Hard to tell in the middle of that fucking jungle, you know? Anyway, we’d been on the move for fifteen minutes or so, Leroy out ahead a few paces, when he stops and motions for me to be real quiet. He points off to his right where he’s heard some movement. So we take it real slow, coming to the edge of a small clearing. Leroy motions to start to circle right. We take just a couple of steps when he screams, ‘Look out, man, eleven o’clock!’ And for some reason, just as I start to turn, he jumps in front me.” Dixie stopped, heaving, and shook his head. “All these years I still don’t get it. “Why did he do it, man? Why?? Because right then Charlie got off a round straight through Leroy’s throat. It spun him and he falls over on me . . . ” His voice trailed off.

“Look, Dixie, if this is too tough—”

“No! I gotta say it, you gotta hear it.” Again, he paused waiting for his breath to catch up. “So there we were, Leroy clean on top of me, this god-awful gurgling coming from his throat wound and bleeding out all over me.” He paused for a long moment. “How many years has it been? I still dream about it . . . that sound . . . the blood . . . . Well, I freaked, man. I started pushing like hell to get Leroy off of me. I managed to roll him enough to the right to get him off. That’s when the grenade went off to my left and I caught the shrapnel in the back. I was hurting like a bastard and dazed, you know? But I was also pissed as hell and pumped up with adrenalin, I guess, because I grabbed a grenade from my vest, pulled the pin and heaved the fucker as hard as I could to where I thought Charlie was hiding. And I got real lucky, so they told me in the hospital, because I blacked out.” He stopped now, his breath even more labored as he wrestled with terrible memories long suppressed. The morning mist had grown heavier, beginning to glisten on Dixie’s wan face. “What they said was that my grenade took out a VC machine gun nest and that stopped the rest of the squad from getting their asses ambushed. So they said I was a hero and gave me this,” he said, taking the small case containing the Silver Star from his shirt pocket. He looked at me, his blue eyes cloudy. “I ain’t no hero, man.”

“Well, sure you are, Dixie. You saved a lot of lives.”

“Only way I coulda done it is because my life was saved.” He stood slowly, stiffly. “Let’s find Leroy.” I helped him across the walkway. Leroy’s name was in the bottom row nearest the ground. “Get me down,” he said, so I supported his right arm while he knelt before the wall as spidery rivulets of moisture were beginning to creep down the face of the polished granite. With trembling fingers, Dixie gently traced the engraved name of his dead comrade. Then, he opened the case containing his Silver Star and removed the medal. “This is yours, man “ he said, his voice beginning to break, and placed it beneath Leroy’s name.

“Are you sure, Dixie?” I said softly. “That medal was given to you.” He shook his head as a light rain began to fall.

“No. It belongs to him.” He fell silent and bowed his head for a long moment. “There’s something else here,” he said, “that’s been eating at me all these years.” The words were choking in his throat. “Leroy? He was Black. My sorry ass was saved by a Black man.”

My friend bowed his head again and began quietly sobbing.

I looked up as, with a fluttering of wings, a morning dove landed on top of the wall, cocked her head down at us, cooed once and then lifted away into the mist.

© Nick Young

Nick Young is a retired award-winning CBS news correspondent. His writing has appeared in dozens of reviews, journals, and anthologies. His first novel, Deadline, was published in the fall of 2023. He lives outside Chicago.

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