By Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell

Prologue….                                                                                  

December 25, 1972

     I had just turned 9, and Cat Stevens had released the album “Teaser and the Firecat” the year before. My older brother, Steve, loved Cat Stevens and for a little girl who adored her big brother, that was good enough for me. Although he was 11 years my senior, we were very close. He returned from a tour in Vietnam that year.

     I was too young to understand the politics behind “Peace Train,” but I liked the song that talked about a train on the edge of darkness. Besides, the album cover had a cool cartoon cat that was also appealing to my young consciousness. I asked Santa to bring me a cassette player and the tape. It wouldn’t be until a couple of years later that I realized those presents from Santa actually came from my brother, who delighted in the fact I was learning about his brand of rock and roll. I played the song over and over on Christmas day. 

      I understood that Steve was in a war, and I realized the danger. The year before, my brother wrote from Vietnam and asked my parents to get me a dog as a present from him for Christmas. I named him Chu Lai, for the base where my brother was stationed. Chu Lai the dog was a black longhaired dachshund mix. He grew to be about 10 pounds.

     Of course, I studied the map in my encyclopedia and finding Chu Lai the base, I imagined what it was like.

     For two years, we watched the war on the news every night. I saw boys no older than my brother running through jungles and shooting guns and I wondered if I would catch a glimpse of Steve.

     Then there were the flag-draped coffins.

     After the news was over, when I said my prayers, I always asked God to bring my brother home. I knew my mother prayed for this too. Sometimes we prayed together and sometimes, when the worry overwhelmed her, I caught her sitting alone in the living room. Except for the glow of her cigarette, darkness surrounded her until a car turned the corner to go up our street.  The momentary flash of headlights through the picture window revealed my mother’s heartache. I crawled into the rocking chair with her. Having had my little world bumped off its axis at seeing my mother, my protector, the center of my universe waver, I said, “Don’t cry, Mommy.”

     “It’s OK,” my mother replied, reassuring me that everything would be all right by holding me tight and kissing my hair. “I just miss your brother.”

      When he finally came home, I asked Steve questions any child would ask about guns and how many people he killed, not really understanding what that meant. He only told me he shot “very big guns,” but wouldn’t answer my question about the killing. He didn’t like talking about the war, and I finally stopped asking. We were all just glad our prayers had been answered.

January 26, 2001

     My mother’s 90-pound frame shrunk at the news. There was nowhere to go. This time, there was no darkness to hide our grief. She was sitting in a chair and collapsed in a heap on her kitchen table. “That damn war,” she wailed between sobs. Her worst fears were realized. She lost her son.

     This time, it was me who held her. I stroked her hair as she had stroked mine when I was a child. Her thin frame suddenly felt so small. Only now, I didn’t tell her not to cry.

     I carried the news I had learned that morning with me all day. I knew I had to tell her that her only son, my brother Steve, was dead. He had stayed with my nephew in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the summer and fall of 1999, but later left for Fargo, North Dakota to find work. Three Christmases had passed since my mom and I talked to Steve on the phone in November of that year.

     He was an intelligent and informed person who liked to spar with us over politics, so we knew by the time the disputed 2000 Presidential election rolled around, and we hadn’t heard from him, that something was terribly wrong.  In January, I finally found the courage I needed to start trying to learn what happened to my brother. It took me two calls to find out what we already suspected. The first one was to the Veteran’s Administration, who couldn’t help, but suggested I call the Social Security Administration to see if there was any activity on his social security number.

     “I’m sorry,” a disembodied male voice told me. “Steven C. Fivecoat was reported deceased on November 21, 1999.”

     And so the war finally ended for him, nearly 30 years to the day after he enlisted into the Army. We thought our prayers were answered in 1972 when Steve walked off the plane, instead of being carried in a flag draped casket. But for the veterans - the people we citizens hail as heroes - wars don’t end for them until they’re gone. And for the mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins and friends, the last shot fired in a war does not necessarily mean “Mission Accomplished.” Although Steve had battled mental illness and addiction since his return from the war, it wasn’t until that night that we fully understood our prayers were never really answered.

February 2, 2001

     “There’s my baby boy,” my mother said, as she took the framed photo of Steve as a toddler from my hands. I spent the better part of the morning rummaging through one of her three cedar chests that contained a lifetime of memories. I found what I was looking for, validation that Steve, my brother, was once a happy, normal child with promise of a future. The photo would grace the church altar at his memorial service the next day.

     After I handed the photo to Mom, I traced the outline of baby Steve and our young father in another photo. I cried at having lost them both. I felt a deep sense of loss for my dad and brother, but I couldn’t fully grasp how Mom felt, having lost both her husband and her only son within a span of less than 20 years. But at that moment, I came to the realization, as we all do at some point, that our parents weren’t always the people we came to know. They too were once young and full of hope, for themselves and for their children.

     I looked at a family photo taken of our parents, Betty and Frank Fivecoat, Steve and our two older sisters, Linda and Janet, just days before I was born. As usual, Steve was laughing, obviously having a good time during the family portrait sitting. Dad told him to straighten up so they could take a decent shot. 

     What did our parents dream for all of us, for him, the moment that photograph was snapped? Whatever it was, I know neither of them could ever imagine that Steve’s life would end as it did.

     I handed another framed portrait I found for the memorial to my mother. It depicted a happy, smiling, brown-eyed boy wearing a western shirt embroidered with a cowboy and a lasso. On his head sat a cowboy hat that was the staple for every red blooded 1950s era American boy. The studio headshot didn’t show it, but a pair of well-worn cowboy boots completed Steve’s outfit. Although my parents could coax him out of the boots that had to be set on the porch to be aired out each night due to the stench from continuous wear, he refused to give up the hat, even when he went to bed. “Hopalong Cassidy” was his favorite television show and the cowboy hat stayed with him until it finally frayed.

     His beaming expression in the photo stared at me through Mom’s folded arms. It was a stark contrast to the torment on her face, which had remained fixed since the day I told her Steve was gone. She sat now in her rocking chair, staring at the ground, holding the photo to her chest as though the gleaming boy were on her lap and she were back in time 48 years.

     She is still a mother who so desperately wants to protect her son; even knowing now it is too late, I thought.

     I sat with her in silence for a long time, until we both felt the weary effects of the past few days. She didn’t want me to stay the night with her. She told me she wanted to be alone, alone with her son.

     “To me, he’ll always be my little boy. I loved him ever much as a man as I did when he was a child. I will always love him and be proud of him,” Mom said as I left her house.  

     In the aftermath of his memorial service held 14 months after his death, we were left only with questions. Questions about how such a promising young life went so terribly wrong. Questions about our failure to help him. Questions surrounded his disappearance and why, although he was holding a plethora of information in his pocket when his body was discovered, that his mother, who was his next of kin, was not notified of his death.

     The new “war on terror” began just nine months after we learned of Steve’s death. The next several years have reminded us of the long-term effects of war on veterans and their families. For our family, whose military service to this country can be traced back to Mad Anthony Wayne in the Revolutionary War, the question regarding Iraq became “Are the reasons just enough for any person to go through what Steve did, to go through what our family went through? Is it really worth another veteran falling through the cracks?”

     Would these veterans, too, be forgotten long after the yellow ribbons have faded and the magnetic patriotic stickers fall from our SUV’s? We shudder at the thought of the veterans who will experience night terrors from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that could lead them to addiction and despair, as it did for Steve. And we recoil from the thought of all the mothers who will lose sons and daughters now and in the future.