The Universal Soldier

My second cousin Louise was a few months older than me which was important when you were in your early teens.  Her parents would come up from the States to visit my grandparents so I met her a few times in the very early 60’s.  She was tall, slim, quiet and very pretty (like her nursing grad picture).  She read lots and the two of us sat on the basement steps at my grandparents and talked for hours.

I lost track of her when she stopped traveling north with her family. Her mom and her sister Alice would occasionally come to visit, then just Alice and her husband every once in a long while.  So it had been 50 years since I last saw Louise.

Then I reconnected with Alice on Facebook a little over a year ago only to learn Louise had been diagnosed with cancer caused by exposure to Agent Orange. Louise had graduated from Nursing and served as a Captain in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. This is what Alice wrote to us after Louise died last month:

Yes, it is like the Vietnam War got her all these years later. Turns out some of the chemicals in Agent Orange encapsulate & hide out, and later on, they can come out & bite a person again. Louise was thinking that a previous shadow on an adrenalin gland, something that showed up in x-rays years ago & was under a 'probably nothing/we'll watch it' comment by doctors....that this was where the dioxin or whatever it was hid out.

When she was first diagnosed, I asked her about Agent Orange. "But you weren't out in the countryside or the jungle, when that stuff was raining down from the planes," I said. "But the guys would come into our evac all wet & covered with that stuff," she said. A good share of those guys have been gone for a long time already. There was another young soldier from here who was directly exposed. He made it home, got married, had a little baby girl, and then he died after a short battle with cancer. That was back in the 70s.

She fought it valiantly! Surgery, chemo, radiation....she had some of each. She was certainly a tough cookie. She was truly a person of integrity, always going the extra mile & doing more than was called for. I believe that the verse from the Gospel of John 15:13 fits her very well (Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends).

In those days and especially when you were from the Mid-West, you didn’t question.  You went and did your duty and assumed you were fighting for God, Country and a Just Cause because the people you trusted told you so.  Louise did right for her times and her family is justifiably proud of her.

But those she trusted lied to her and to every one else who served.  As they continue to do.  Perhaps as “they” have always done to the soldiers who fight for the empires of the rich and powerful?  And they reward them by treating them like heroes until they are wounded or discharged from service and then they are abandoned.  They reward them by poisoning them with Agent Orange in Vietnam; with depleted uranium and suspect vaccinations in modern wars.  And still the young men and women sign up and still they fight.  It has been forever thus.  They are the Universal Soldiers.  Maybe they need to stop.  Because the rich and powerful will not.