He was tall and so thin that anything he wore looked like it was two sizes too big.  The bones of his face looked like they were trying to stick through his skin.  There was a shambling, sideways way he had of walking, it looked like he took two steps forward and one to the side.  A cigarette was always dangling from the corner of his mouth.  Whenever he wanted something, he would ask for it and his head would start nodding.  It was almost imperceptible at first and as it grew, you found yourself nodding along with him.  He was the smartest man in the squad and for some reason, he was never afraid when we were in a fight.  His last name was White and so was the color of his hair. 

     I remember that he was from somewhere in California, a magic place to someone born in Philadelphia.  I'd met a few other guys from there when I was in training, they talked about something they called 'liquid sunshine' and held themselves as experts on things from politics to pot.  Whitey wasn't like that, he had a self-effacing way of talking.  He never claimed that he was any kind of expert, but every new guy in the platoon would look for him to answer any question.  He didn't act like a big brother, instead he acted like a very old wise man who would patiently sit and try to help explain things to the newer guys.  I was in country for six months before he got there, but he started explaining things to me.  Whitey was like that, a born teacher.  He was also a magnet.

    When we fought as dismounts between the tracks and tanks, Whitey always picked up shrapnel in his legs.  It didn't matter if the blast was near him or several vehicles away,  the little pieces of metal seemed to bounce through the road wheels and find his legs.  He would examine his legs every night and would 'help' the shrapnel by squeezing the skin around the wound until it was near the surface of his skin.  He used razor blades and tweezers to get rid of it.  He used the color of the skin around the wound as a guide, when it went from red to purple it was ready for his operations.  His best friend, Bird, would offer opinions to the FNGs about to the best way of avoiding being anywhere near Whitey when we started to fight.  They were in awe of Whitey but they all liked him.

     Bird used to talk constantly with him but Whitey seldom answered with anything more than a grunt.  That was all Bird needed to keep rambling on. Sometimes he'd almost smile at the Bird, especially when Bird would start the story about shooting Whitey in the back.  It wasn't much of a story, it was an accident and the bullet only grazed Whitey's flack jacket, but the new guys lapped it up.  If he thought a new guy had a question but didn't want to seem dumb if he asked it, Whitey would find out what the question was and either ask it himself or take the guy aside and explain things to him.  He had a dry sense of humor and could put me on every time.  He almost never laughed outright, he'd just sort of chuckle at something if it tickled him.

     The only time he laughed long and hard was in the alley in Cholon on the ninth of May in '68.   I was amazed to see him and the Bird almost falling down with laughter as they ran out of the alley with bullets kicking around them.  It seems that they were getting fire from a small one-man fighting position and they were moving up to knock it out.  It looked like a fresh one, a long narrow bunker with the top looking like a mound covering a grave.  As they moved in, a hand appeared at one end of the bunker and tried to flip a grenade over the top at the two of them.  Before they could move, the grenade hit the top of the mound and rolled back into the bunker.  The story had to wait while they caught their breath; then they told us that the hand appeared again, flipped the grenade again with the same result and then exploded in the bunker.  They were still laughing when we pulled back later that afternoon.

     Later that night the tale started to get embellished.  Before I knew it, the Bird had the hand appearing three times and it moved faster and faster as the fuse burned down.  Guys were crowding around, each talking about what happened to them during the fight but nobody came close to Whitey and the Bird for the shear entertainment of their story.  I shook my head and walked back to my track.  It was the birth of a new war story.  I knew it would be told and retold in the coming months and years.

     Whitey died some fifteen years ago and we just found the Bird two months back.  He's in a wheelchair, suffering from Parkinson's Disease, and I'm going to try to get him to Harrisburg for the next reunion.  I can't wait to hear the story again, hear the different versions.  I'll miss Whitey then, maybe he'll be able to hear us from Fiddler's Green, maybe not.  But I'll close my eyes and think of him, think of that shambling walk, that dry chuckle.  He'll walk through our memories, tall, skinny, the cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. . . .

     John G. Jerdon
     Earleville, Maryland.

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