Growing up in a military family, war was a fact of life, and I learned at a young age that the costs of war extend beyond the battlefield, a lesson that, sadly, still applies to the present day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
My dad was a Marine, and in the spring of 1967 I was a young boy living on the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. I was in sixth grade and attended a Catholic school in the nearby town of Triangle. Each day the school bus would swing through my neighborhood and pick up myself and several other children who also attended St. Francis School.
One child in particular, Catherine, stands out in my memory. She was a petite young girl, 6 years old, in first grade. Catherine was very quiet and painfully shy. She was the last child to be picked up on our route, and each morning the bus would stop in front of Catherine's apartment building where she would be waiting on the sidewalk by the curb, lunch box and school books in hand. Her mother would stand in the doorway of their building and wave good-bye. Catherine seldom spoke and often sat by herself near the front of the bus. I felt sorry for her because she seemed somewhat frightened by the whole experience of leaving her mom and going off to school.
The Vietnam War was in full swing in the late '60s, and, living on a military base, the war was omnipresent. Whether it was troops being shuttled to one part of the base or another, the distant sound of artillery shells, or helicopters passing overhead, training maneuvers were a constant backdrop to daily living.
Word spread quickly among us kids as to whose dads had received orders to go to Vietnam, and at some point I learned that Catherine's father was in Vietnam.
One morning the bus stopped to pick Catherine up, but she wasn't there. The driver opened the door and waited. A woman appeared at the entrance to the apartment building and walked out to talk to the bus driver. She was a neighbor of Catherine's family, and told the driver that Catherine wouldn't be coming to school today. Her family had been notified the night before that Catherine's father had been killed in Vietnam.
A chill went through me when I heard the news. That poor little girl, I thought. So shy, so timid, and now without a father to help guide her through life.
I never saw Catherine again, but that memory still haunts me. I think of her often, the little girl waiting by the curb each morning for the school bus, and the many casualties of war, some of them so innocent, and so far from the battlefield. And I wonder how many other Catherines there are in the world, unintended victims of wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, on all sides of the conflicts.
Don Lyman is a freelance writer and adjunct instructor at Merrimack College in North Andover.
