Not Just A Spectator
At six this Saturday morning; I was not real hip in getting up and going anywhere. It was wet and cold and I was still sleepy. I had photos to take and that in itself was probably the most motivating factor propelling me.
I got to be part of the "Great Buy". I told you here about CC collecting toys and money at WalMart for Toys for Tots. This morning we went to spend all those dollars dropped in the jar Thanksgiving weekend.
We went to the Big Lots Store in Macon to do all our buying before they opened at 9am. It was like what you see on TV. We had every cart at our disposal and rushed around getting whatever struck our fancy. CC choose to use his weekend's walking quota for this event.
Last year and years before, all the gifts given to families for the most part contained toys for younger children. Our mission was to collect items interesting to older kids.
CC, Ron and, Bitsy and myself were designated buyers. Bitsy had the Bibb County money for children in that county and we had $1600 for Monroe County to buy whatever we wanted with an extra 20% off.
This is a partial list of items I remember putting in the multiple buggies we were filling:
microscopes,chess, checkers, yatctse, huge artist sets, photo albums, soft blankets and “husbands”, exercise mats, baseballs, watches, clocks, radios, markers and pens and dry erase boards
We filled many baskets. The three women working at Big Lots took our carefully bundled stacks of cash and counted them. Cars began congregating outside as stressed and worried shoppers watched us plunder all the good things.
Leaving, Ron said, Can we eat, yet?" and it was off to the Cracker Barrel for eggs and biscuits. Conversation eventually turned to the VA - as Ron has had over 20 surgeries on his eye from a retina suddenly detaching a couple of years ago. "Agent orange," he muses, "or blasts from aircraft repeatedly emitting missiles near my proximity."
This gets us thinking about compensation, how do you quantify a terrifying and brutal experience of war into the money that helps you survive into old age? How do you prove the culpability of war in your injuries to your body and psyche? How much money do you deserve as your body and mind deteriorate years later in ways that are directly connected to this combat?
Ron and CC are in the process of going through records which are not easily attained. Going to our congressmen and getting paperwork such as the date any man in your company was killed. You figure out which of these pertain to where you were and what was happening to you on one of those brutal days of killing which you experienced forty years ago and present this as evidence of your injuries and subsequent disabilities.
Just yesterday my husband told me the stupidest thing he ever did in Vietnam. He took his boots off one night before he laid down to sleep for awhile. This of all nights was the night the NVA (North Vietnamese Army ) overran his company perimeter lines over to the right of his squad's position. They got past the L P (listening post) and past a machine gun fighting hole and threw a grenade into the machine gun hootch, killing and injuring them - and then they were there, inside the Charlie Company perimeter in the dead of night where two out of three men were asleep.
Eventually the N V A were beat back outside the perimeter and were mortared in prearranged grids until there was a scattering of dead or dying N V A around the outside of the perimeter and quite a few within it.
At day break CC and his squad had to check the bodies, make sure they were dead. Later he had to throw dead and naked N V A on to a pile of bodies in a bomb crater.
________________
How much to you pay a man or woman to experience this? We are having to prove PTSD at a time we are doing our best to keep it at bay. A woman asked me the other day, isn't he better after all this time?
The answer is no, he is not. It gets worse as his body grows older and his hips no longer carry his weight and severe pain has become his most familiar companion. Back in the day, his anger did not have to be controlled with seizure medicine so those of us who love him could be near him. But the veneer has worn thin. Suggestions to skip a pain pill when seeing the psychiatrist, so she will understand his condition are met with looks of skepticism by me. How I am to escort him if he is not compliant with treatment? I am human. My feelings get hurt, I get mad - because if he gets started, he will stay at his targets until they are inflamed with his same fire. He has to comply, compensation be damned.
________________
Breakfast over, we climb back in our vehicles and proceed to the Firehouse in Forsyth. Over in one area there already stacked are toys for eligible families. Sure enough, they all look like perfect gifts for children under eight. We bring in our white bags, but we don't take the toys from them. Others in this chain of charity will unsack the packages, get the lists of families, divide the toys accordingly and deliver to families when the time comes. Firemen, Veterans and their wives. An orchestrated event taking place Christmas after Christmas. This year I helped. I may have gotten it - the good feeling which comes at Christmas.
