After the Flag Has Been Folded

by Karen Spears Zacharias

  During the summer of 1978, I’d called Granny Leona in Tennessee to tell her I was getting married.

  “What’s the boy’s name?” Granny asked.

  “Timothy Zacharias,” I said. “He’s from Joseph, Oregon.”

  “Well, you couldn’t get any more biblical than that,” she replied. I laughed.

  Tim was everything Wesley had not been. He was intelligent and kind and patient. And best of all, he was one of the most godly men I’d ever met. His parents, Gene and Gwen, had raised him in the jungles of Ecuador, where they were serving as missionaries with Wickliffe Bible Translators. Tim had spent much of his formative years reading books, over and over again, by flashlight, eating alligator for dinner, and playing with his pet, a monkey named Judy. By the time we met, Tim was a graduate of Judson Baptist College, where he’d been a member of the basketball and soccer teams. He was at OSU working on his degree in history when a mutual friend introduced us.

  We didn’t take to each other right way. He thought I was a flirt. I thought he was a nerd. At the time I was dating a member of OSU’s crew team. Tim didn’t attract me. But over the course of the next four months, we grew to be friends, and from that friendship a romance sprouted. We had our first date in February 1978. I called Karen Mendenhall when I got home that night. It was about 1 A.M. Georgia time. “I’ve met the man I’m going to marry,” I said.

  “How do you know?” Karen asked, trying to sound awake.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just know it.”

  Tim and I were engaged by the end of March. We married in August. Karen and Lynn flew out to Oregon to be my attendants. We had not seen one another in three and a half years, but our friendship didn’t skip a beat. We spent the week traveling to the Oregon coast and Willamette valley, laughing and telling stories about our mamas and the Rose Hill gang, just like we always did. Lynn and Jimmy had broken up, and Karen had called off her relationship with Andy Kelley and was dating a fellow I didn’t know—Philip Clark, a Hardaway boy.

  Mama spared no expense at my wedding. She paid for everything—the dress, the flowers, the cake, the reception—without complaint. She did it for me and for Daddy. It was the sort of wedding he would’ve wanted to give me himself, had he lived.

  Uncle James, who was living in Colorado at the time, flew out for the event. I think it was his way of trying to fulfill his promise to Daddy. James had turned his life around and was working a respectable job as a maintenance supervisor for several buildings in downtown Denver. He was very sweet to me. James would have probably escorted me down the aisle if I’d asked, but I had asked Frank do it.

  Moments before he walked me down the aisle, Frank lifted my veil, bent over, and kissed me on the cheek.

  “I wish Daddy were here,” I said, wiping away a tear.

  “Me, too,” he said.

  After a brief honeymoon to the Oregon coast, Tim and I returned to OSU to complete our senior year. Three months later I was pregnant with the first of our four children. Our son, Stephan, was born in August 1979. He was followed in close succession by identical twin sisters, Ashley and Shelby, and then Konnie.

  When the nurse at the college infirmary confirmed that I was pregnant, I was distraught. Tim had planned on going to seminary. I wanted to teach high school. This put a definite kink in our plans. But when the nurse suggested an abortion would fix everything, I knew better. “No, thanks,” I said. “It’s really not an option for me.”

  That was the same answer I gave another nurse at the Wallowa County Health Department in December 1983, when I discovered I was pregnant for the fourth time. Ashley and Shelby were only seventeen months old. I’d just barely got them weaned.

  We were living in the very remote town of Enterprise, where Tim was working as a history teacher. His family lived nearby, but mine had moved far off. Linda and her husband, Greg, were living in Washington. Mama and Frank and his family were in Alaska. Not long after moving to Oregon, Frank had joined the Army and was making a career of it. He was stationed in Anchorage with his wife, Janet, when my son was born.

  Despite his religious conversion, Frank’s drug habit continued to plague him. In 1981 his drug dealing earned him an all-expenses-paid trip to one of the best drug-treatment programs in the nation, the Army’s disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Janet was pregnant with their second child. His daughter Amy was a preschooler.

  Mama moved to Alaska to support Janet and the kids while Frank served out his prison term. David Paul Spears II, my brother’s son, was nearly a year old before his daddy laid eyes on him for the first time. Frank walked out of that Kansas prison and into a degree program at the University of Alaska, where he earned his engineering degree and his self-respect. Mama stayed in Alaska because she liked her job and the rivers.

  She kept trying to get me up there, but I refused. “I’ve gone as far north as I’m going,” I said.

  Mama had come back to Oregon for a brief stint while I was pregnant with the twins. But when they were a week old, she sat with me on the front steps and told me once more why she needed to move another three thousand miles away. She had her reasons: better job, better opportunities. She felt guilty about leaving me again. “It seems I’m always taking off during the times when you need me most,” Mama said.

  “You do seem to have that habit,” I replied.

  I tried hard to mask my hurt over Mama’s leaving. Being a mother myself had helped me see Mama in a new way. I understood how easy it was for a girl to forget who she used to be in an effort to be the mother her children need her to be. I was beginning to recognize, in very small ways, how my father’s death had affected Mama.

  When People magazine came out with its 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon issue in March 1985, I sat in my home in Enterprise and wept. I had lost touch with all things military. I felt cut off from Daddy and Mama and from all things familiar. My days were consumed with laundry, naps, coloring books, and Cheerios.

  I scrounged around the house for a pen and paper. The only writing utensil I could find was a broken crayon and the nub of a number-two pencil. Taking the paring knife from the kitchen drawer, I sharpened what was left of the pencil and wrote a letter to People. The unlined paper was stained with bitter tears when I put it in the mail. People published the letter in its April 1, 1985, issue.

  I was 9 when my father was killed in Vietnam. He received the Purple Heart, many other medals and the traditional military funeral. Although I loved him and wish that war had never happened, the real hero in my life was the woman he left behind. My mother was 29 when my father was killed. She had three children and a 9th-grade education. She could have lived off the government, or being young and attractive, she could have married again. Instead, she got her high school equivalency, then her L.P.N. and worked for several years as a licensed practical nurse at night while going to college during the day to get her R.N. (making the dean’s list, I might add). My mom was liberated before anyone ever heard of it. She, not my dad, bought the only two homes we ever had. She never remarried because no one could match up to the man she lost to Vietnam. She continues to work as a nurse in Anchorage, and as I grow older my love and respect for her grow deeper. I am sure my father is pleased that his death brought out the best in her.

  This was my very first published piece. Vietnam made me a writer. I had to find some way to structure the chaos; writing gave me the ability to do that.

  WHEN I LEFT GEORGIA, it never occurred to me it would be a permanent move. I’d been so busy getting grown up, finishing school, and having kids that I was simply too worn out to consider anything except the immediate, which was usually a toddler crying. I’d given birth to four kids in five years.

  Granny Leona died when Stephan was a toddler. I didn’t have the money to attend her funeral. I hadn’t been back to see my kin in Tennessee in years. In 1985 I grew terribly homesick. We didn’t have any money, but Tim promised to take me south as soon as possible. That summer we loaded the
kids, all preschoolers, into a Volkswagen van and drove south.

  Mama thought the trip would disappoint me. She expected me to feel disconnected from the land of my youth, and she was hoping I would no longer feel like an immigrant to the Great Northwest. “You can never go home, you know,” she warned me. “It won’t ever be the same again.”

  Mama was wrong. Columbus, Georgia, always feels like home to me. I’m tied to its landscape and its people in a way that Mama can’t understand. I suspect it’s because it’s where I best remember us as a family.

  IT HAD BEEN ten years since I’d left Georgia. I vowed to never let that much time elapse between visits again. I might not be able to raise my children as Georgians, but I was determined to make sure that they knew the South of my childhood. So I took them to the park on Morris Road and showed them the house where I tumbled willy-nilly off the bunk bed and Daddy rushed me to Martin Army Hospital. I took them to the park where Daddy, Frank, and I played catch. And I bought them Krystal hamburgers and told them Mama used to buy a bagful for five dollars. I took them to visit Kadie the Kinnett cow. They giggled at one another as they stood under Kadie’s giant udder.

  Then Tim and I took the kids to Nashville and Rogersville to meet Papaw David’s people and to visit his gravesite in Greeneville. We stayed with Uncle Hugh Lee and Aunt Nina. When we left, Hugh Lee was sad for days. “I’ve never missed so many people at once in my entire life before,” he said.

  We visited Uncle Woody and Aunt Gertie and Uncle Carl and Aunt Blanche. We ate snap beans and fresh tomatoes from Carl’s garden and drank the sweet tea Blanche fixed earlier that day. And at each stop, I hugged my kinfolk and told them how much I loved and missed them. I returned to Oregon feeling more disconnected and distraught than ever. I was weary of chasing after Mama. I’d moved to Oregon to be near my family, and all my family had moved elsewhere. I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged.

  That following spring our daughter Ashley was diagnosed with syringomyelia, a rare spinal disorder whose origins are still undetermined. The disorder can be crippling, as sacs within the spine fill with fluid and put pressure on the nerves. In Ashley’s case, it resulted in a spinal curvature of thirty degrees and nerve damage to her right leg.

  In March 1986 Ashley underwent hours of surgery at the University of Southern California San Francisco Medical Center. She was three years old and had never been away from her twin sister for even a night. Mama did not come down for the surgery. Tim and I were in San Francisco alone with Ashley. Tim’s parents were caring for the other three children. Ashley spent ten grueling days in the hospital, mostly doped up on morphine.

  It was a full week before we knew if she could walk. Earlier attempts to get her on her feet had failed. She would either throw up or cry out in pain. Doctors had skillfully inserted a shunt that drained the fluid from the sacs in her spine into her abdomen. But that had left her with two major wounds, one in the spine, one in the stomach. We finally coaxed her to walk across the room by telling her that if she would walk over to the phone, she could talk to Shelby. Their friendship was sealed in cement even then. Her gray eyes were lit with desire and determination. Ashley gingerly slid her slippered feet across the linoleum floor. It took her nearly twenty minutes, but she finally reached the phone and cried as she spoke to her sister for the first time in nearly two weeks. Tim and I wept with them.

  After that family crisis, Mama and Frank reconsidered their decision to live in Alaska. Deciding it was too far away, they returned to Washington, near Linda. Mama got a job working as a prison nurse in Shelton, and Frank opened up his own engineering business in Auburn.

  Before the twins started school, Tim and I relocated to Pendleton, Oregon. It wasn’t nearly so remote as Enterprise and put me a little closer to my family—now it was only a six-hour drive to Mama’s, instead of eight.

  Ashley’s medical condition continued to improve. I continued to write. Lynn and Karen flew out for visits. Beth took the train (she’s afraid of flying). Some summers, I would load the kids in the van and drive south again. Sometimes Tim went, sometimes I went alone with the kids.

  When Rufe McCombs got ready to retire, Beth called and ask if I would write her mother’s memoirs. I told Beth I didn’t know a thing about writing a book, but Rufe insisted. I was in graduate school at Eastern Oregon University at the time, trying to update my teaching certificate. My professor, George Venn, assured me that I was up to the task. “I’ll show you how,” he said. And he did.

  Mercer University Press published Benched: The Memoirs of Judge Rufe McCombs in 1997, and in 1998 it was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year award.

  It was during the summer of 1996, while I was in Georgia working on Rufe’s book, that I began to search for the men who had served with my father. I only knew the names of two men—Sergeant Hank Thorne and Sergeant Erwin Naylor. I hadn’t heard from either of them since 1966. Thirty years had passed since Daddy died. Yet, his death was still as raw as to me as if it had happened the day before yesterday.

  CHAPTER 29

  third man down

  FINDING THE MEN WHO SERVED WITH MY FATHER MIGHT HAVE BEEN EASIER IF I HAD STARTED EARLIER. But even if I’d tried as a teenager, it would’ve been a difficult task. Mama had long cut herself and us off from Daddy’s Army buddies. She didn’t stay in touch with Nita Thorne or Shirley Naylor or any of the other military wives she’d hung around with almost daily in Hawaii.

  The Naylors invited us up to their place several times, but Mama never did take us to visit them. She and Shirley had been best friends when we lived in Hawaii. After Daddy died, we made a couple of trips to Alabama to visit the Thorne family, but not after Hank returned from Vietnam. Mama simply could not bear seeing other military wives with their husbands and kids. It reminded her of all that she was missing.

  I finally tracked down John Osborne, the man who was serving as my father’s commanding officer at the time of his death. Osborne had written the letter to Mama explaining Daddy’s death in full detail. He had described Daddy as “a close and dear personal friend.”

  My brother was the only family member who had spoken directly with Osborne following our father’s death. Sometime during those teenage years when his angst over Daddy’s death was reaching a fever pitch, Frank had called Captain Osborne. “It was right after I graduated from Lyman Ward,” my brother told me. “Mama said that Dad’s commanding officer had written her a letter sometime after Dad died. She didn’t have his phone number, but she remembered that he lived in Kentucky.”

  It took several phone calls before Frank connected with Osborne. “I told him I was David Spears’s son and that I was trying to find out more information about my father and his last days. He was very nice, and he told me what he could remember, but I came away feeling frustrated. Like I had more questions than I did answers. It was definitely a feeling of being unsatisfied.”

  After that, Frank never tried to find out anything more about our father’s death or his last days in Vietnam.

  Unlike me, Frank has never felt that Daddy died in vain.

  “Dad knew exactly what he was doing,” he said. “He knew he was fighting in Vietnam for all the right reasons. He was fighting to make people free, but the people of America didn’t think we needed to be there, and they were too damn self-centered to care about our fathers. That’s why the Vietnam veterans came home to empty airports or to people spitting on them. There were several times I wanted to go over there and kill every North Vietnamese I could find.”

  Frank’s eldest son is named after our father, and like the grandfather he never knew, my nephew is a military man who was trained at Fort Benning, Georgia. Frank’s not troubled that his son volunteered to serve. “I’m proud to have my son carry my father’s name. And if being a soldier costs him his life, I’ll be proud of that, too. And I make damn sure he knows it.

  “At least now people are giving soldiers respect for what they and their families have sacrificed,” he said. “The
only respect Dad ever got was from the other soldiers at the time. Soldiers always respect each other because they know why they are doing what they do.”

  Frank remembers that during our father’s funeral procession, older gentlemen alongside the roadways paused from their work to salute Daddy’s hearse. “They were probably World War II veterans,” Frank said. “As the funeral procession passed by, they stopped what they were doing on the sidewalks and in their lawns and solemnly saluted as Dad’s hearse went by. But that was the total of the thanks given to him by strangers for the sacrifice he made in giving his life for his country.”

  It’s awfully sad, really, that even though my brother and I grew up in the same household, missing the same father, we never talked about Daddy or about our sorrows. I wish we could have, but the attitude of the day just didn’t allow for such discussions, not even behind closed doors.

  CAPTAIN OSBORNE DID NOT seek out our family after he returned from his tour in Vietnam the way Sergeant Naylor had. He had his own set of troubles to deal with—a divorce on the horizon, a couple of kids of his own to tend to, and the recurring nightmares that plagued him.

  I understand how the pressures of daily living and the grief over an unpopular war may have kept him from coming alongside our family, but the little girl in me wishes he’d been there to tell me tales of my daddy, to take me fishing in a boat the way Daddy might have. Or simply to have watched out for us and given us a safe shelter from time to time. Most of all, I’ve longed to hear a firsthand account of how my father died.

  I found Captain Osborne via a letter he’d sent to Mama. It was one of the few items from Daddy that she’d held on to over the years. Dated September 1, 1966, the lined notebook paper it’s written on has yellowed, and the young man who wrote it has lived long enough to see his dark hair turn white. Osborne recounts the story of my father’s death and at the end extends an invitation: