| Veterans¹ Day was unpleasant. The sky grudgingly
faded from black to gray, the only indication that morning had come. Rain
fell in almost horizontal sheets, like icy wet razor blades blown off the
back of the several hundred trucks that zip through downtown every day.
Even fat men ran for the car. A typical November day. Except for those
people standing at attention all day in front of the local Monument. They
didn¹t run. They planted a few flags and faced the west, staring down
the street into gust after gust of stubborn Canadian air. No big banners.
No big displays. They just stood there. Which, of course, made me
think of Mrs. Westphall¹s face.
The Westphalls lived across Frederick Avenue from me when I was a kid Islander. On a clear day you could see the top of the Empire State Building. That, and the block you lived on, were a person¹s identity. So the Westphalls, my end of the block, were clan. Sharon Westphall was my sister Lillian¹s age. A decent kid, she and my sister seemed to get along OK, and they never seemed to mind teaching Lill¹s odd kid brother how to jump rope, again. Sharon had a big brother, probably 10 years her senior. Like most kids his age on the block, he was an icon to the born-in-the-early-60s set. Jimmy Westphall. We knew it was his block before it was ours, but his world was growing so it was our block now. I lived about 100 feet from his front door, but I have only one clear picture of him: the front page of a little weekly called Merrick Life, standing in his Army blues. They didn¹t run the picture when he got out of boot camp, too many people did that in 1969. It wasn¹t news. They ran it in 1970, after he died. On Jan. 6, 1970, the day before his 20th birthday, James Francis Westphall, E3, was blown out of his body in a place called Tay Ninh in a country that doesn¹t exist anymore. He died in combat from enemy small arms fire. I know this because I looked it up today. I was a few weeks shy of 7 when it happened, so I don¹t remember much. Images mostly, the newspaper, my mother looking shocked and helpless, Sharon melting into her backyard, Mrs. Westphall¹s face. I don¹t know when I saw it. I don¹t know where she was or who she was with. All of that has been stripped from my mind. I just see her face, looking somewhere other than at me, looking empty, vacant, tired, profoundly sad. Mrs. Westphall was a widow. Jimmy, her only son, had volunteered. Pretty soon we never saw what remained of the Westphalls again. But I never forgot Mrs. Westphall¹s face. As near as this non veteran can tell, the tragedy of war is that people die. Read that slowly, because the point is less obvious than it seems. People die. People who were born, crawled around somebody¹s living room in diapers, brought home a kindergarten report card and swelled when it was tacked to the fridge, played the frog in the class play, never ate their broccoli, stayed out too late at the prom and carried a million little dreams about some someday, died. The sacrifice, the contribution toward political objectives, is honorable and should be honored. But the tragedy for us all in the end is the tragedy Mrs. Westphall understood right away. The loss. Like poverty and crime and ignorance, war dilutes us.
What kind of people could we be if we had those dreams back? How many Einsteins
died in Tay Ninh? How many Coplands or Jeffersons or Salks were lost at
Inchon, Normandy, Antietam and Concord? How many decent, honest, everyday
regular folk will never get a chance to paint the gutters, coach the little
league team or watch the little sister grow up because war is a contest
of right-place right-time, and they weren't? We shouldn¹t forget that.
I think that¹s why veterans were out there, unfazed by the cold rain.
People who can see the faces and saw the deaths are determined that, somehow,
everybody else ought to appreciate what was lost. After days spent remembering
a face and mourning a man I hardly knew, I think they did their job.
John Carberry, Class of 81
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