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The Letter

Charles Hayes

    Chuck—Still struggling with the readjustment to surgery, and maybe that is part of it all, but I can not watch the Sunday Morning Shows and the people that our president marches to the cameras without feeling a deep disgust. Almost like a preordained response my mind always flashes to Vietnam and how I and others like me dishonored and spit on the people of that country. Again, today, I am ashamed and angered. And I know that many, if not most of those who were with me then and are still around now, are shamed and angered as well. It seems that our bond born during those despicable actions of our nation still bind, even as we continue to pass on.
    When I am in an airport and I run across one wearing a Vet Vet hat my younger days of being repulsed are now replaced by an understanding of the convoluted turn our lives shared back in that day. But if that other one is under the visor of a big cheap MAGA hat I still flash back to the young inhumane miscreants too dumb or too wild to stay in college, or too despicable to be married, or to poor to buy their way out it. It’s like a fusion of the young and the old self, both ending in a sad, depressing, and miserable place. I suppose the natural reaction to such milieus is to try to strain the one from the other and attempt to gain a place to stand. But, like John Donne says, I am less for each part of me, the main, that is lost to the other. No doubt whom the bell tolls for. It is me.
    Since you are as much a human being as I am, I think I can tell you that whether it is talked about or not, it is there. The elephant in the room, I think it is called today. You have for the most part done the right thing I imagine and you deserve to know these things. I have done many of the wrong things and despite that I have grown old. There must be some sort of reason for this. I believe it is possible that God’s grace allowed me the time to see and live under the closest thing to Satan I will ever experience. And to come away from it enhanced.
    I lead you, please follow.—Charles

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