Now the Day is Over

Every Memorial Day, I mourn the death of my Army intelligence buddy Ed Sonnichsen

“Reflections,” by Lee Teter (oil on canvas, 1988). Teter did the work to express his grief over the deaths of veteran friends and donated the copyright to Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) Chapter 172, in Cumberland, Md.

ONE DAY IN LATE AUGUST 1968, the word came: Our friend Ed Sonnichsen had been killed in Vietnam.

Shock rolled through our small group at the Defense Language School in El Paso, Texas, where the Pentagon in its infinite wisdom had opened a branch to teach us Vietnamese. A dozen of us knew Ed well from Army Intelligence School the year before. The tall, handsome and gregarious former star college athlete had been ordered straight to Vietnam while the rest of us were freighted off to learn Vietnamese at a very safe distance, and time delay, from the war. When Ed’s orders came, we’d mocked him in classic military humor. He was S.O.L.—shit out of luck, we laughed. Sorry ‘bout that. “Send us postcards,” we howled.

Now he was suddenly gone. The news arrived like a thunderstorm—first the silent flash of lightening, then the loud crack, then the growling thunder and dark sheets of rain.

It wasn’t just that we’d lost a buddy; we’d suddenly been put on stark notice that the cushy intelligence jobs we expected in Vietnam could get us killed, too. That hadn’t been on my Bingo card when I’d volunteered for intelligence, signing up for an extra year to evade the draft that would almost certainly lead to my youthful, useless death in a rice paddy in under two years.

The intelligence school regimen had bloated our expectations: We were trained in classic espionage tradecraft, as if we were going off to West Germany to be undercover spy recruiters, tasked with finding people who could steal Soviet bloc military secrets behind the Iron Curtain. It was all very heady—and comforting, of course—sliding toward a life in corduroy jackets and smokey European cafés, not the hell hole of Vietnam. We would soon enough learn differently.

But before we got final orders, news of Ed’s death arrived like a double tap on our smug sense of impunity. A friend was gone, which was bad enough, but so were our expectations that we’d escape the punishments of Vietnam.

My friend Ed Sonnichsen. Probably a college photo.

Sheltered in Place

As it would turn out, I did escape the worst of it, with a job and an air conditioned office under cover as a DoD civilian, running a spy operation from the safety of Danang, a rundown former French port city on the central coast, where the only real danger came from the occasional Vietcong rocket lobbed into the city. In that, I was what the nearby Marines called a REMF—a Rear Echelon Mother Fucker—one of countless thousands of U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and, yes, Marines, who, by the roulette of military assignments, got jobs at a distance from the fighting while many others died.

It hardly needs saying that not only was I lucky to get out alive (Agent Orange tripped me up years later), but that Ed was the only close friend I lost in the war. Over 58,000 American families and friends had to endure some version of that heartbreaking scene in Saving Private Ryan, when a mother in a rural farm house collapses in her doorway when she sees an olive drab Army sedan with a chaplain driving up the road.

(I would later learn that Ed, who I was told was operating under cover as an Army doctor, died when he was lured into an ambush by communist spies who had learned his true identity. On the other hand, someone who served with him wrote on his memorial page that Ed was killed when he rushed to the rescue of other soldiers under attack.) The whole story may be around somewhere, but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.

So I’m doubly lucky that I’m not burdened by an immense grief of having lost many friends in Vietnam—some who might’ve been right next to me in the jungle taking a round in the head. But so many mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters suffer year after year, not just from Vietnam, of course, but Korea, World War II and the damn “forever wars” habit that we just can’t seem to shake.

A Long Walk in Darkness

One midnight in the late 1990s, years after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened, I went down to The Wall with another veteran whom I’d become friends with years earlier at Boston University night school, where we’d both gone after Vietnam to get a belated degree. Under pressure from the draft in 1966, like me, Johnny Connell had signed up for what a Navy recruiter promised him would be easy, safe duty as a corpsman (AKA medic), “just cruising up and down the East Coast on a destroyer,” far from the war. Then one day the fickle finger of fate tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You are going to Vietnam with the Marines.”

Johnny told me he came home with so much shrapnel in him that he was still setting off airport metal detectors. Now here we were, fortified by alcohol, walking down the gentle slope aside the rising granite slabs, engraved with some 58,200* names arranged in swelling numbers in order of their deaths, year by year, starting with Army Maj. Dale Buis, on July 8, 1959. At the deepest part of the path, I stopped at a panel and touched the name of Edwin C. Sonnichsen. “My only friend who died,” I said to Johnny.

We kept walking down the path. At the next towering panel, engraved with hundreds of fatalities, he stopped and studied the wall in silence.

“You know anyone here?” I whispered. He didn’t answer right away. But then he waved an arm up and down at the panel and turned toward me, the edges of his eyes leaking. “I knew all these guys,” he said.

Eventually, I lost contact with Johnny. Like many disillusioned and bitter veterans, then and now, he turned to the right politically. But on this Memorial Day, like every other Memorial Day, or any Veterans Day, if not every day, I’m sure he has in mind the many Marines he tried and failed to save, armed only with bandages and tourniquets and blood drip bottles, amid the horrific noise and carnage of battle.

I have only one fallen friend in mind today—and many days—but that’s enough. ###

*The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982, originally had 57,939 names inscribed, including approximately 1,300 who were missing or prisoners of war at the time. Over the years, additional names were added to reflect corrections, late recognitions, and updates from the Department of Defense, bringing the total to 58,276 names as confirmed by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and the Defense Manpower Data Center.