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by Jeff Burt
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For many years on Memorial Day I’d call brother Paul and thank him for serving on a minesweeper in the years that spanned the pull-out from Vietnam to the hostage crisis in Iran. He’d boast about military secrets he’d carry with him to the grave as if his stories were kept in a linen-lined attaché locked and chain-linked to his wrist, secrets from patrolling the Arabian Sea, none of them true.
After he left the Navy and moved with his family to northern Wisconsin, he’d occasionally remember and complain about the interrupted saving of pro-American Vietnamese boat people in ’78 and ’79, attempting to escape revenge on rafts and fishing boats, many poor, some starving. His ship saved some. The men on board shared their rations. Other boats and rafts would drift away in the distance, his ship under orders not to pursue.
Those not rescued haunted him. He went to therapy when he returned to port in San Diego.
At times, he once told me, when remodeling his basement he’d shut off the lights and look up the stairway to the kitchen. It would remind him of ascending in his ship to the darkness of night, lights on the water, hoping to spot and hoping not to spot a raft swamped by waves and the weight of slender bodies fleeing for a new home, in his mind going back to finding the fishing boats and hauling the people on board. He’d fantasize that those who drifted out of sight would be found by morning. He said disturbance of his soul came each time he’d fish late at the lake, the evening bringing ghosts of those saved and unsaved.
Paul never knew what happened to the people he helped save. He and the Navy did what they could and then people vanished into camps and then other countries. But sometimes it’s more than an anonymous hand you grasp. Sometimes it’s more than a person pulled from the heaving sea. Sometimes, it’s a kindness that leads to the future.
Three weeks after my brother Paul passed away, my wife and I shared a meal with a friend, her daughter, and her daughter’s friend from the Naval Academy. We ate, shared each other’s food, and during that time I shared my brother’s experience off the coast of Vietnam.
The daughter’s friend told me that one young woman, nameless, malnourished, whose hands reached upwards to a sailor’s grip, survived the ordeal at sea and survived a hostile refugee camp, then was airlifted to the United States to start life anew. Years later she became pregnant. She had a daughter who excelled in school, who went to the Naval Academy to become an officer, and now a Rhodes scholar.
“I don’t know if your brother personally helped save that woman,” she said, “but I am her daughter.”
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Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife. He has contributed to EcoTheo Review, Per Contra, The Nervous Breakdown, and Gold Man Review.
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