For most of America, this Monday, January 20th, means one thing: the Presidential inauguration, and that is how it should be. For me, though, it means something else. It was the day that my boyhood best friend — a 20-year-old kid named Bobby Gasko — was killed by friendly fire just two months after he arrived in the jungles of Vietnam. January 20th will mark 55 years; January 20, 1970.
It happened on a Tuesday in the late afternoon, dying light, in a southeastern coastal region of Vietnam known as Binh Thuan. Communication being what it was back then, I found out about it three days later on a cold Friday night.
I am not the first person to lose a friend in a war, I will not be the last — there's nothing special about my experience. And certainly, it does not rise to the pain of those millions over the years who have lost a son or a daughter, or a husband or a wife, or a brother or sister. But it is a pain that never goes away and brings guilt along with it, and it usually helps to talk about it, so I will.
Years ago, I found a quote that stopped me dead in my tracks. It's from one of my favorite American novels, All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren. It goes like this:
"The friend of your youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, and he continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy's voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire."
"The friend of your youth." That's what Bobby was to me, and me to him. You're lucky if you have one of those; a friend to learn with, confess those painful boyhood secrets, and share some of the joys of growing up. That's what we were. Two kids in a small town (Mays Landing, New Jersey, if you're scoring at home). Cub Scouts together, Pop Warner football together, little league together, girlfriends together, sleepovers together, ringing doorbells and running away on Trick or Treat night together.
We parted ways after high school; two engines traveling on parallel tracks. I went to Muhlenberg and took my books and English studies pretty seriously, and Bobby pledged a fraternity, found too much time to party, never found a major that interested him, and failed out after his freshman year.
Anyway, it was hard for me to relate to Bobby's decisions. He didn't look to get into any other college. He didn't take advantage of his father's political power to avoid a 1A classification that would almost certainly send him to Vietnam. He and his new girlfriend found out they were going to be parents shortly after Bobby got his draft notice. I found myself on a confusing September day in 1969 as his best man at a quickly-planned wedding at Fort Dix. It all felt surreal — a parody of what was supposed to happen when you are 19 years old.
Sure enough, Bobby went to Nam, and I wish I could say I thought about him a lot but I didn't. I had my own stuff. Studies, girlfriend, basketball, partying. He wrote me one letter from over there and I remember one line: "Don't come over here," it read.
I got the news that Bobby had died from my mother on a Friday night. It was just as I was going into a college party. There was shock and genuine anguish, of course, but there was also guilt and regret. Why hadn't I thought about him more? Sitting in my comfortable college classroom, I could write abstract protests against the war while he was in Vietnam actually fighting it.
It's been 55 years and I've never resolved it, and I never will.
I'm not looking forward to this inauguration in particular, but then again, I never do look forward to January 20th.
