For the umpteenth time, I was at the Wade Park VA Medical Center recently for yet another injection of medicine in my right eye to keep my age-related macular degeneration from worsening.
As usual, I wore my black baseball cap with an embroidered patch on the front indicating I am a Vietnam veteran of the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division. Shortly after I got on an elevator in the atrium to go to the Eye Clinic on the third floor, another Army veteran, noticing my cap, asked if the First Infantry Division is headquartered at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I said, “No, that’s the 101st Airborne’s headquarters. Fort Riley, Kansas, is the headquarters for the First Infantry Division.”
He said he had been assigned to the U.S. Army’s Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. I asked if he had also been in Vietnam, and he said ‘No’. I said, “Good for you. You saved yourself some grief and tears.”
The first procedure in the Eye Clinic was a vision test, which was unchanged since my last injection eight weeks previously. Around 20 minutes later, with my pupils dilated, Myra, a technician in the eye clinic, took photos of the retinas in both eyes. Myra noticed my birthdate on her computer screen and said, “You don’t look like you’re 82.” I said, “Well, my eyes are 82–but the rest of me is 19.” She smiled.
While waiting to meet with the doctor who tested my vision, a veteran walked up to me and mentioned that he also served with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam, coincidentally during the same time frame, from July 1967 to July 1968. He told me he was a combat medic, and I said, “Tough gig. The only blood I saw was my own if I nicked myself shaving. But I lost a lieutenant during the Tet Offensive three days after his 23rd birthday. His whole life blown away. We went to Vietnam to kill communists, and now Vietnam, a communist country, is our ally against China. All those lives wasted.”
I told the veteran I was drafted, and he said he was too, then I said, “Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.” He nodded in agreement. Whenever I go to the Wade Park VA Medical Center, I feel grateful not only for the excellent care I receive but also for my relatively good health. For example, while waiting between appointments at the Eye Clinic, when one veteran’s name was called for his appointment, I noticed when he got up from his chair and was wearing Bermuda shorts, both of his lower legs were missing. He walked on prosthetics. Another veteran in a motorized wheelchair was missing his lower right leg but had no prosthetic.
On a lighter note, the waiting area between appointments in the Eye Clinic features an HD TV on the wall, set to the ION channel. I said to one of the veterans, “Can you change that to the Playboy channel?” The quick-witted vet said, “I can, but whenever I do that, I get hollered at.” I smiled and said, “I don’t want you to have to do any push-ups”.
Speaking of push-ups, as an aside, I was moving along in a zig-zag queue at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport last summer, preparing for a flight to Boston for a family vacation on Cape Cod.
A woman said she liked my T-shirt, which said ‘Veterans for Peace’ and featured the organization’s logo underneath its name. I said, “I wish everyone did.” (On the back of the shirt is a quote from a January 10, 1946, speech General Dwight Eisenhower gave in Ottawa: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”)
In line with her husband and children, the woman said she and her spouse were army veterans who met in Iraq. She noted she outranked him, and I said, “You outranked him? That means you could make him do 20 pushups. “ She smiled, as did her husband.
Drafted in 1966, Pumphrey was a reporter, then editor, of the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division newspaper in Vietnam. He is a member of Veterans for Peace and a founding member of the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation. An award-winning former reporter for The Catholic Universe Bulletin, Pumphrey lives in Shaker Heights.