Tag: Echoes of Nam

Remember and Honor

On this 25th day of May 2026, we remember and honor those who died in military service. This is for all who went to serve and didn’t survive. Any one of us who served could have been one of them, and any family could be related.

I know of only one relative who died while serving. Uncle Arne Gerhard Benson died at Ft. Lewis, WA, in 1943 while serving with the US Army. Some family letters talk about his service as a civilian in the Army Corps of Engineers before he enlisted.1 Whittier, Alaska, January 29, 1942, Dear Mother, … This is a Gov. Defense project, so I’ll be here until next year sometime. I hear that they are censuring the mail now so will not say anything about it. I can’t think of much to say except that we have plenty of ice and it’s cold. Give everyone my regards, and love to you. Arne

Jan. 16, 1943 Dearest Mother, … We had some pretty tough going up North, and also in the Orient so it seems quiet and peaceful here in comparison. I can’t tell you much about it now but hope to be able to soon. I have two months of intensive training left here and then the Lord only knows what next. If they have any more Hell and High water to dish out I guess I can take it.

Ft. Lewis Wash Jan. 16, 1943, Dear Dot, … I didn’t tell Mother as she would have worried. I transferred my Service Nov 3 when I got out of the Hosp. I was with the Army Eng. in Alaska water and also the Near East. I got broken up during a heavy Blow in the Bering Sea. My collar bone, three ribs, two vertebrae in my back and my left leg below the knee. It sounds like a lot but wasn’t so bad. 2Did the COE have fishing boats? There are pictures of Arne on one during that time period.

There may have been others, but Walter Trisko was the only high school classmate3Central High School, Alexandria, MN, class of 1955. I remember dying while serving Vietnam. Classmate Walt

So, remember and honor those who died but be aware that for many survivors absence from war is not the same as peace of the soul.

4th Effort for Bulwer-Lytton

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenged entrants
to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. I’d written Echoes of Nam: Absence from war is not the same peace of the soul and thought about a ‘how it came about’ story.I did a tongue-in-cheek for the contest.

Would you continue reading a novel that started with a one sentence paragraph like the one below?

I’m Maria Conception Aquino and being an omniscient, all-knowing in literature voice only, observer, in-the-right place, at-the right-time, I put forth this biography of Hacker Lee Goor including but not limited to the lives of Brandon Taylor Grame and Adam William Brax for your most earnest consideration, so believe me – facts I don’t know personally or for which I have no written or recorded oral testimony are not guessed or supposed in this document; however, some conversations based on verifiable evidence are put into my words and phrases to further the story, but if you were there and know differently, please forgive my assumptions, and if you were not a witness, it matters not to me because just like many things we did not observe, they reasonably could have been.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was founded in 1982 at San Jose State University.

None of my entries were published, and as explained in the post here none will ever be.

1 For reasons I cannot explain, I say, having repeated myself over and over again, I do therefore declare again: I am often random, so another post may interrupt the series I first intended to post in sequence.