The debut on September 17 of the Ken Burns documentary series on the Vietnam War should stir memories among those of us who lived through those trying times.
It made me thing about my late friend, Capt. Michael R. R. Odum, U.S. Army, who died in combat there on September 11, 1969. I also thought about the devastating impact on his mother, who never recovered from the loss of her only child.
Mike was at Leon High School, Tallahassee, FL, when I was across town at Florida High, and we got to know each other through after-school activities. He was a serious student, a bit eccentric, and not easy to get to know, but I made friends with him.
I would see Mike from time to time when we were both undergraduates at Florida State University. I was a reservist enlisted sailor then – attending weekly meetings at an off-campus reserve center – while he rose through the ranks of FSU’s Army ROTC to become brigade commander. You couldn’t find anyone more enthusiastic and committed to the Army.
His service as an artillery officer later in the 1960s coincided with the height of U.S. combat operations in Vietnam. Mike was on his third tour there when he was killed in action in Phong Dinh province.
The Army awarded him a Bronze Star medal for bravery. More important, he earned our gratitude for giving his all for our country.
But there was another human cost that went mostly unnoticed.
When I moved back to Tallahassee from Washington DC and New York City in 1986, my new home in the Lafayette Park neighborhood was around the corner from his. His elderly mother still lived there, a recluse, alone in a house showing years of neglect. Mike had been her only child. She never overcame losing Mike.
His VW was parked in the front driveway, right where he left it before leaving for his last combat tour two decades earlier. It had a heavy coat of grime, which even Tallahassee thunderstorms could not wash off. All four tires were flat.
His car stayed there until his mother died a few years later, a mute reminder of her tragedy.
I couldn’t pass by without a great sadness weighing on me.
When the new owners renovated and modernized the house, they sent Mike’s car off somewhere, turning a new page of that house.
I carry that image to this day as a reminder of the human cost of war, how each life is precious, and how we must never spend a single life of our brave men and women carelessly or cynically.
Mike’s name appears on the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. – halfway down the 18W panel. When I’m near that end of the National Mall, I stop by to touch his name engraved in marble.
I also say his name out loud.
Someone once said that everyone dies three deaths: first, when your body gives out; next, when your body is buried, and third and finally, the last time a person says your name. So as long as someone is left to say his name, Capt. Michael R. R. Odum lives on.