Yesterday for Memorial Day I wore a red-white-and-blue t-shirt I bought a couple years back in Iowa with the state flag on it. I announced that it wasn't for me but for Sgt. Steve Rushing, US Army, who died fifty years ago this summer, age 20 in Binh Dinh.
As I write this, Steve is, to my awareness, the only person I have ever known personally in my life who died in a war. The fact that he remains this after fifty years is remarkable testament to the type of age we have lived in during my life.
Sadly I have no direct recollection of Steve--although I have many memories from that time, and of the basement of our church, St. John's-by-the-Campus, where he lived while going to college at Iowa State, a fact I just learned from that article linked above. I also remember when he died, and how upset my father was, as he was a friend of my father. Steve had struggled about whether to enlist and go to Vietnam. Like my father, Steve was politically liberal and opposed the war, but he came from a background that gave him a sense of duty to country (in the late 1950s my father had tried to join the Army but was rejected because he was born almost blind in one eye).
In the end Steve joined the Army and he was killed in action. My father felt deep sorrow about that for years, although he never spoke about it much unless I brought it up.
After my father died, I brought this up with my mother.
"Steve was always going to do what he was going to do," said my mother, almost dismissing the whole thing. "Your dad had nothing to do with his decision."
That lifted a burden off me, for some reason.
I have many memories of his parents, Buck and Betty Rushing. They left St. John's-by-the-Campus when my parents did to help found a small family-centered mission church of the parish on the north end of Ames, called St. David's. For years I saw them nearly every Sunday we went to church. I remember the Rushings as kind people. Buck was large, warm and friendly, with a Santa beard. His wife Betty was thin and affable. They were always in the pews of the small church. Betty was a mainstay helping with church functions. I even remember their house, I think, and could probably find it if I had to.
We left Ames at the end of the 1970s and being still young, I ceased thinking much about the people at our church back there. The Episcopal Church sort of blew up and disintegrated anyway, and ceased being much of a cultural force in America. St. David's was eventually closed and folded back into the main parish church. The build was sold and redeveloped into a retirement home, such the whole area is no longer recognizable. My dad would have known what became of the Rushings. He kept up with people that way, at least knowing about them, long after we left Iowa--and of course especially about Steve's family.
As a child, the past recedes quickly. In 1981, only a few years after we left, I was cast in a high school dramatic production about a young man who, during the course, of the play, goes off to Vietnam and is killed. In the play, the young man is drafted. I played the young man's father, who wants his son to do his duty, and not to avoid the draft. I remember our high school drama teacher, who directed the play, trying to coach me to understand the character. She asked me to draw on experiences I might have, the way one does with, say, Method Acting.
Looking back I realize how I utterly failed to connect that character with Buck Rushing. Only now do I come to understand what sorrow they must have carried after Steve's death.
I forgive myself for that failure, however, as young people usually can't understand about these things. Also the 1970s and the Vietnam War seemed like a different era already by 1981. History moved so quickly back then. The last few decades it has tended to linger around more than it did then.
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