John and Roger Dale Lee, cousins of mine and each other who were inseparable friends over the summers when I was growing up, and all three of us joined my uncle Frank Lee in the milking parlor of Frank’s dairy barn on the family’s farm in a South Mississippi hamlet named, for obvious reasons, Leetown, enlisted together in the Navy in 1968, soon after their eighteenth birthdays, rather than waiting to be drafted. Three years older than me—I missed the draft by a hair, with a low lottery number, when it ended in 1972—they shared a vision of serving together, doubtless aspiring to see no more of Vietnam than its coastline from the deck of a ship. But the Navy had other plans for them, regardless of any recruiter’s blandishments and empty promises. They took one look at Big John, as he was known to us, six foot four and already skilled with farm machinery, and said, “You’re a Seabee.”
John had something of an easy war, a year in Vietnam at the height of the conflict notwithstanding. For those who might not know, Seabees are the Navy’s version of Army Engineers, so he built bases and roads, and wondered at the verdant beauty of the country they’d flown across an ocean to save from itself. He spent a certain amount of time sheltering in bunkers at forward bases while mortar shells dropped in from fringing jungles and machine guns hammered away inside and outside their perimeters. But he didn’t have to face the terrors and hardships of front-line Grunts humping their way over mountains or crawling through rice paddies under enemy fire.
Roger Dale’s experience was altogether different. The Navy trained him to be a corpsman, and he served as a medic with the U.S. Marines and Army in fighting as thick as any faced by American troops in the godforsaken labyrinths of Southeast Asia.
I saw Roger Dale only once after he returned. He was seated, back straight, eyes closed and legs entwined in a lotus position, meditating under a pine tree in his parents’ front yard. His mother and father were pleasant and unassuming folks, relatives of ours and members of our church who had built a nice brick home for themselves and their son and daughter just up the road from our driveway, and they humbly thanked God in Heaven when He brought Roger Dale home in one piece.
But Roger Dale only appeared to be whole. Vietnam had scored and scarred him, turned his world upside down, shaken it and stirred. Without a doubt it afflicted him with what we now recognize as PTSD—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, first given that designation in reference to the many psychically walking wounded, of which he was certainly one, streaming back from the battlegrounds of Southeast Asia in the Sixties and early Seventies, just as veterans return from the Middle East today in need of helping hands and words and professional care, guidance, attention and understanding. In addition, Vietnam had endowed him with an addiction to opiates.
It was a not uncommon affliction among Nam Vets, and medics were especially vulnerable, carrying ample supplies of morphine and needles with frequent need to use them in the reddest heat of the unwaking nightmare of front-line combat, where medics are most urgently in demand precisely at the fighting’s bloodiest and most dangerous points and peaks of insanity. It had been all too easy, a tiny step, whenever he finally came to it, to slip a needle into his own vein, seeking Nirvana in Hell. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese government—and many among South Vietnam’s military and political leaders—made sure that the markets and bars of South Vietnam were flooded with cheap and potent Golden Triangle heroin to speed him along on his spiritual journey to oblivion.
“Everything I was ever brought up with and taught was a lie,” he said to me in the harsh open shade of the lone pine tree on the hot summer afternoon when I walked up the road to see him. “All my life I was told that n*ggers were the lowest form of life on Earth. And then I saved black dudes’ lives, and black dudes saved mine. Some of my best buddies were Brothers—black dudes, white dudes, it didn’t make no difference when you were In Country. There’s nothin’ for me here, Doug. Nothing but lies and hate. I’m getting out, goin’ down to the Coast. Then I’m lightin’ out for California.”
He didn’t talk about combat, but told me of a time when he and his mates had received an invitation to visit a Buddhist monk at a beautiful monastery atop a jungled hill. They’d driven up in an open jeep without weapons, as a visible token and risk displaying their peaceful intentions, a bunch of young Marines and one burr-cut 19-year-old Navy Corpsman from Leetown, Mississippi, late an habitué of Frank Lee’s dairy parlor and Catahoula Creek’s swimhole. The boys sat in the gardens in quiet tranquility, smoking grass and listening to the chants of monks and chimes of cymbals, with a view out over the misty vales of Vietnam of a beauty and heartbreak that Roger Dale had never beheld or imagined. He’d watched the monks meditate on their otherworldly mountaintop, listened to their droning mantras and the gongs and chiming bells, smelled the incense and inhaled the pot and moved for a time into some fragmentary peace of the soul, flying far above the sordid killing zone where he’d never asked to be.
Now he sat meditating, cross-legged and very alone on his native Mississippi’s red clay, seeking a peace he didn’t know was already lost to him forever.
Roger Dale didn’t leave soon enough, it turned out. A few months after I visited him, he was beaten insensible on a country lane half a mile from our farmhouse, a mile from his parents’ home, then run over by a car in a midnight fracas with some of the same local boys with whom we’d hauled hay and gone to Sunday School, swam at the creek and stopped to pick up for a ride if we saw them at the side of the road. John sat beside him at the hospital bed and was alone with him when he briefly regained consciousness.
“Tell me who did it,” John said, “‘cause I’m gonna kill ‘em.” Roger Dale wouldn’t say their names. “I know who they are. I’ll take care of them myself soon as I get out of here,” was all he’d tell John. And then he died.
I’ve never learned all the details. They had to do with drug deals gone bad, and the stench of corruption that has always hung over the doings of the Law and the lawless in Mississippi’s Piney Woods and along its littoral. The organized crime of New Orleans reached its tendrils along the Mississippi Coast long ago, finding fertile soil planted in several generations of moonshiners and smugglers already firmly in place and doing a brisk business. Diehard teetotalling Baptists and makers of moonshine whiskey long enjoyed a strange and unholy alliance of common intent to keep Mississippi a dry state, though for very different reasons, and both were to be found among the makers of Kiln White Lightning, liquid fire distilled in bogs and thickets in the general vicinity of the lumber town of Kiln that lay between our farm and the Coast. My father was born near Kiln, in a lumber-company railroad camp now long vanished under pasture, along with the hosts of moonshiners who once animated the woods. But I was told not long ago that Kiln White Lightning can still be found for purchase, a sought-after item for those whose tastes run to cheap and powerful illicit liquor, from Biloxi to Detroit.
The understanding between citified gangsters and country authorities adapted easily and readily from moonshining and bootlegging to drug trafficking and smuggling as soon as those opportunities came along, changing with the times and customers’ tastes. A steady stream of drugs moves night and day along the great southerly East-West ocean-to-ocean Interstate I-10, and more arrives by sea, ghosted into the marshes’ dimpled coastline and up its winding rivers and bayous for offloading along secluded stream banks.
Roger Dale’s struggle with heroin ran him up against forces much bigger and darker than himself. The boys accused were investigated by a prosecutor who was related to one of them, and no charges were ever brought.
Roger Dale should have lit out for California while he still had the chance…if ever there was a time, from the moment he set combat boots on the red soil of Vietnam, so like and so far from Mississippi’s red clay, that he actually stood a chance of getting out alive. His name will never be etched into the wall of honor at the trench-like Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., alongside those of his real brothers. But it should be, because he was called and he served, and Vietnam killed him, make no mistake about it, just as surely as an AK-47 round could have done. I have never ceased to be grateful that the cup of Vietnam was not passed to me. That means, I’m grateful to Roger Dale Lee, and so should we all be, Americans of every color, stripe and creed.