While writing my previous piece about my friend Bob Weiss, I realized that I knew another person who, I have been told, won a Silver Star. His name is Jay McLean. I then remembered that I had recently seen Jay’s picture on a fiftieth high school reunion Facebook site that one of my classmates posted. I went there to be certain of my recollection, and there was Jay standing in a group of three, all gowned and crowned for graduation in a photograph that must have been taken well in anticipation of the event since it was in the yearbook passed out to us prior to our actual graduation ceremonies.
I first met Jay in junior high school when my family moved from its first home to its second in the small town where I grew up. I didn’t much like the new house since it was far from the homes of the friends with whom I had gone to grade school. I knew no one in the neighborhood since they had all gone to “foreign” grade schools of which I knew nothing. I met Jay shortly before or after I entered the seventh grade at the junior high school we shared, and we quickly discovered we lived only a couple of blocks apart. Suddenly I had a friend in the neighborhood.
We stayed close throughout junior high and were friends throughout high school, even if our friendship had cooled somewhat by the time of our high school graduation. We had much in common, mostly because we were both love struck with girls that didn’t know we existed and we had not the means, intelligence or gumption to make them aware of it. Instead we both mooned over our respective girls from afar and shared our common “pain” with one another. In short, in the never ending war of the sexes that begins about this time of life, we were both clueless and inept. This gave us a bond of sorts.
To describe Jay in this way, without more, is to deny him justice. Jay was a superb trumpet player, very good looking in a dark way, and a very good student. Both of us graduated from the same University on the same day, although by that time we saw little of one another. I probably last saw Jay in either the Summer of 1963 or 1964, since I would have been resident in the town in which we grew up during those far-off Summers following high school graduation. I can well imagine that I must have had a hamburger with him at the local drive-in at some point during those Summers.
I haven’t seen him since.
The reason I haven’t seen Jay is because he died in 1980 in Mobile, Alabama due to cancer, a severe illness once described to me by a mutual acquaintance as “full-body cancer”. In the time between our last meeting and his death, Jay had been drafted and served in the army in Vietnam during the war that defined my generation. I was not present at his death, although I now know that several of my classmates were. I wish I had been.
Seeing Jay’s yearbook picture caused me to begin an Internet search to see what I could learn about his life. To my complete surprise, I could only find the year and cause of his death and the fact that he is buried in my home town in the same cemetery where my parents and his now lie. Further research brought to light that all of his immediate family – father, mother and brother – are also dead.
You need to know a bit more about Jay. He was a Staff Sergeant in the army, had some form of unfortunate interaction with Agent Orange while on duty, and may have won a Silver Star for bravery by crawling into a crater left when an armored vehicle was blown up by enemy fire, searching for wounded while dirt and debris were still raining down. I say “may have” because the only source I have for this information is another classmate who remembers Jay telling him the story of the medal.
When I went back on line to find a list of Silver Star recipients from the Vietnam War, not only could I not find any such list, I found, instead, websites that stoutly maintain no such lists exist. I found Bob’s name, but I couldn’t find Jay’s. I don’t mean to imply by this that I doubt Jay’s story. To the contrary, Jay did not exaggerate or lie. But I was profoundly shocked to discover that in addition to this generation of soldiers being generally ignored by most of us upon their return home, the valor they displayed is still ignored years after the nation finally began making efforts to acknowledge their service.
These facts led me to suspect that I would not find Jay on the Vietnam Wall. This proved to be the case. After all, Jay died in 1980 and I have no firm knowledge whether the aggressive cancer that killed him was due to his interaction with Agent Orange. If one cannot link his service in Vietnam with a service related death, then Jay doesn’t belong on the Wall. However, since it is well within the realm of possibility that the cancer that killed him was initiated by the chemical warfare the United States was guilty of employing in Vietnam, perhaps his name should be found there.
It was then that I realized a deep sense of loss as I wondered who, besides me and my equally aging classmates, might reflect upon Jay’s service and valor now that his entire family is gone, and how many other classmates even know the story of his Silver Star. There must be others knowledgeable about Jay’s life: friends and colleagues from his subsequent career; fellow servicemen; casual acquaintances and other acquaintances of a too-short life, all of whom are unknown and unknowable to me. Here is a man who may have given his life as the result of a foreign war who has no one to remember his valor in the absence of a bronze plaque or a published list of honored servicemen; here is a man lonely in his death.
Jay simply doesn’t exist within the virtual space known as the Internet for he died prior to its gestation as a publicly available information source. He also is absent from the usual physical forms of remembrance, for the simple reason that the time of his death and the time of his service do not coincide. This last statement assumes, of course, that the cancer that killed him was caused by his exposure to Agent Orange, and his life on line is so sketchy that I was not able to find his obituary.
I feel singularly unqualified to be the one to remember Jay in writing because I never knew the man Jay became and was not privileged to hear from him the stories of his adult life. My only knowledge of his adulthood is of his service and death, not of his life.
It strikes me that his death, the lack of knowledge of what he did during the war and the manner of his dying proves what I have always believed: the Vietnam War was the perfect mug’s game. It was a purposeless (unless you believe in the domino theory and the Tooth Fairy) war fought, as all wars inevitably are, by old men besotted with power and dreams of domination who employ young men as their weapon of choice. And the one precious gift our many dead from that war gave to us – the hard-won lesson that you do not send young men or women to fight for no good reason in a part of the world where we have no real national interests at stake despite the spewings of politicians to the contrary – we tossed away lightly upon our entry into Iraq looking for the mythical “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.
While I have no hesitation in stating this as my personal conclusion about the Vietnam War, I have some hesitation about including it in this piece because I have no idea how Jay viewed the war and do not wish to dishonor his memory should he have held a contrary view. However, my view is relevant to my reason for writing this piece: why, given all of the significant waste and societal damage done to our culture by the Vietnam War, do we continue to suffer losses from that war by allowing someone like Jay to pass into history unnoticed and unremembered? For even if I lack facts or if some of the things I believe are incorrect, I have faith that his death was a direct outcome of his military service even if the war ended 8 years before the time he left us.
I hope someone will take the time to record their memories of Jay as an adult and I hope they will share it with me since I am unable to hear it from him. The only story I can tell about Jay with any confidence is of his teenaged years. And while he had nothing whatever to be ashamed of from this period and he achieved much in the small world of our junior high and high schools, these were small stages and the things I knew of him then were not the essence of the man he became. These small things must have played some formative role in forging the courageous young man that crawled into that shell crater, but they lack the heft needed to understand how he could have made such a difficult choice at such a terrible time. That is a story about Jay that I would like to know about rather than imagine.
Of course, Jay is not alone in his isolation. There are still thousands of soldiers from the wars of the last century who are listed as missing in action. Other veterans have undoubtedly died after wars have ended as the result of wounds, illnesses or emotional disorders suffered on the battlefield. When the bronze plaques are forged and the medal lists are written, these men and women are left off because they did not die in battle. I should have known this, but I did not. It took a glance at Jay’s picture in a fifty-year-old yearbook to show me another of those curiosities that exist all too often in the course of a human life: patently obvious facts are frequently hidden from our view by the kind of cataracts fed by inattention and lack of focus.
It can be well argued that all of us will die and be eventually forgotten no matter what our position in society or our achievements in life, even those few who manage to last for eons by evolving into creatures of stone or bronze. But to do so in Jay’s case is to fail to recognize that some give so much more of themselves than others during the course of their mortality, and that those who do so deserve to be remembered and honored well beyond the lifetimes of those of us who do not.
