1972 to 2001, Kansas City, Kansas

By Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell

Dec. 25, 1972

I just turned 9 and Cat Stevens released the album “Teaser and the Firecat.” My older brother, Steve, loved Cat Stevens and that was good enough for me. Although he was 11 years my senior, we were very close. He came home from a two-year tour in Vietnam that year.

I didn’t understand the politics behind “Peace Train,” but I loved the song and the visual it created about a train on the edge of darkness. I asked Santa to bring me a cassette player and the tape and I played the song over and over on Christmas day.

I understood that Steve was in a war and I remember realizing the danger. For two years, we watched it on the news every night. I remember seeing boys no older than my brother running through jungles, shooting guns.

And there were the flagged draped coffins.

After the news was over, when I said my prayers, I would always ask God to bring my brother home. I knew my mother prayed for this, too. Sometimes, when the worry overwhelmed her, I would catch her sitting alone in the living room. Darkness would surround her until a car would turn the corner to go up our street. The momentary flashing glow of headlights through the picture window would reveal my mother’s heartache. I would crawl into her 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 would say, “Don’t cry mommy.”

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

Steve was only 17 when he enlisted in the Army – a reaction to our dad’s demands that he either return to school for his senior year or go into the military. My mother’s worry was laden with guilt for not having found Steve a safer course.

When he did finally come home, I asked Steve questions any small child would ask about guns and about 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 how many people he killed. He didn’t like talking about the war and I finally stopped asking. We were all just glad that our prayers were answered.

Jan. 26, 2001

My 75-year-old mother’s 90-pound frame shrunk at the news. There was nowhere to go. This time, there was no darkness to hide our grief. The upper portion of her body collapsed in a heap on her kitchen table. “That damn war,” she wailed between sobs into her folded arms. Now it was me who held her. She felt so small, so broken.

And I didn’t tell her not to cry.

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

When he came home from the war, he went to work at an automobile assembly plant, but his mind never left the jungles of Southeast Asia. Steve struggled with night terrors and guilt. He medicated himself with alcohol. Like so many veterans of his personal war, he found it difficult, and then impossible, to go on living what most of us consider a normal life.

Still, Steve was an intelligent and informed person who liked to spar with us over politics. We knew by the time the controversial 2000 Presidential election rolled around and we hadn’t heard from him that something was terribly wrong.

On that sunless, cold day just after the New Year in 2001, I finally found the courage I needed to start trying to find out what happened to my brother. It took me two calls. The first was to the Veteran’s Administration, who couldn’t help, but suggested that 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 Nov. 21, 1999.”

And so the war finally ended for him, nearly 30 years to the day that he enlisted into the Army. We thought our prayers were answered in 1972 when he walked off the plane, instead of being carried in a flag-draped casket. But we never fully understood that for the veterans, the war doesn’t end until they’re gone.

In the aftermath of his memorial service 14 months after his death, we were left with only questions and more guilt. Questions about how such a promising young life went so terribly wrong, guilt over our failure to help him. But the immediate 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 police department could only tell me Steve fell through the cracks before they gave charge of his body to the Veteran’s Administration. For more than 20 years, the federal government noted on his extensive medical records, “Patient poses no immediate threat to himself or others.” After Steve’s frozen body was transferred to a military cemetery, they could only tell me they don’t have the resources to locate next of kin.

In death, as in life, this son and brother, this veteran, was shuffled through the system he gave his life to protect.

After the Iraq war began, I stood in line at the grocery store and a slender woman with short blonde bobbed hair and a long brown coat stood in front of me. In her cart were two children, a blonde little girl with big brown eyes and a little baby boy dressed in a blue jumpsuit. I guessed the little girl to be about 2. Propped up by a blanket in the cart, the little boy looked to be about six months – about the same age as Steve in a photo we displayed at his memorial service.

Like our father, Steve had blond hair at birth. In the photo, baby Steve is wearing a dark jumpsuit and white baby shoes. His wide brown eyes stare up, looking toward his mother, hidden off camera.

The woman in front of me began fingering the magnetic “support our troops” car ribbons – an impulse purchase.

She turned to the little girl, holding one in each hand.

“Which of the two ribbons do you think I should buy for her car?” she asked her daughter. “The one only yellow or the one with red, white and blue?”

The little girl glanced up at her mother from the cart. Her expression seemed to mimic my thoughts: Does it really matter?

How naïve about how war can affect a person, and a family, for generations to come. How naïve we all are until it claims the life of someone we love.

Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell is the author of “No Immediate Threat: The story of an American Veteran,” the story of her brother’s life after Vietnam. She has written more than 2,000 articles for publications such as Audubon, The Associated Press, The Kansas City Star and Fido Friendly.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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