Darlene is begging for an old photo so she doesn’t have to look at my jars of peaches anymore, and since she says she’d send me some heat from her place if she could (I’ve moved my tomato plants in tonight because it may frost here, so you know I need it.), I guess I’ll oblige her. This is a photo of my husband when he was in the U.S. Army. This picture is taken in Germany, but he was also in Viet Nam.
Whenever anyone in the family would ask him about Viet Nam, he’d say there was really nothing to tell. He was just a company clerk, he’s say, and there was nothing very exciting about that.
After he passed away, the subject of Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols came up in youngest son’s social studies class, and the teacher mentioned that youngest son’s dad had been a LLRP. It was news to us, and frankly, I didn’t know whether to believe it or not. Mr. Sullivan, youngest son’s teacher, was my husband’s friend, and he’d grown up as a U.S. military brat, so they had talked about the military a lot, and there was a possibility Keith had told him more than he’d ever told us. But then again, I figured Mr. Sullivan could have mixed him up with someone else, since Keith had never hinted of it to me or anyone else in the family.
When oldest daughter moved home this summer, we went through a few of her dad’s things. In his trunk we found his tiny brown metal military can opener, and she put it on a chain and began wearing it around her neck. One day at work, a couple of old Alaskan military men stopped in for lunch.
“Hey,” one of them said, “is that a military can opener you’re wearing?” She explained that it had belonged to her dad, who’d served in Viet Nam.
“Was he a Lurp?” he asked. Something about the can opener made him think her dad might have been a LLRP. Lurps would wear the can openers around their neck with their dog tags, all three things taped together, he said, so nothing jingled as they reconnoitered.
So perhaps it’s true: Keith was a LLRP and he chose to keep it to himself.