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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, May 8, 2000 Volume II Number 19
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FOCUS - Matters of the Heart
Rich Luttrell is fifty years old. He’s got a good career job at the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs. He’s married, and now his two daughters are grown. His wife Carole was his high school sweetheart. They’ve been through a lot. And they are still together.
Just this year, Rich returned a small photograph to its rightful owner. After thirty-three years.
As a reminder of the day innocence left him, Rich kept a wallet-sized picture of two people, a father and a daughter, in the billfold in his back pocket for most of his adult life. The momentary crisis that would change his life forever occurred when he was age seventeen. It happened deep in the heart of darkness - a remote Vietnamese jungle.
At the time, Rich was but two years younger than our college freshman son Kevin is today.
* * * * * *
Most of us can attest to it.
Some of those turning point events in our private past are seared into our memories like the smoking burn of a branding iron. Just as cattle are marked by a brand, an imprint burned into the tough hide, creating a permanent label, a scar, that identifies to whom the animal belongs, so these moments in our own personal history leave an indelible imprint on our psyche. It cannot be erased. There is no delete key.
These events set the course of our lives. They become a part of who we are. Try as we might to forget, repress, bury, deny… the memories return. Haunt us. Sometimes in a dream. Sometimes on a trip. Sometimes in a photograph.
There seems to be no escape.
* * * * * *
Rich grew up in poverty. His family lived in what locals called “the projects.” Through junior high and into high school in the early nineteen-sixties, Rich was tagged. He was from the projects. That meant his parents needed public assistance to pay the rent. For Rich and the other kids who grew up in public housing, the rest of the world was a world of privilege.
So when the opportunity came along for Rich to sign up as a soldier, and leave the projects for another world, he grabbed it. Grabbed it like a seventeen year-old grabs a ticket to Disneyland. An Army assignment in a far-away place was a welcome alternative to the mean streets and hallways of what he’d always known as “home.”
Three meals a day, clean uniforms, comfortable bed, and shiny new boots made the first few days away seem like winning the lottery. He didn’t even mind the haircut. But it didn’t take long for the glamour to fade.
They trained Rich in guerilla warfare. They taught him to shoot an automatic rifle. To survive alone in the jungle. They taught him to kill.
He joined the 101st Airborne’s First Brigade. They issued his gun and gear. Then they turned him loose in the jungles of South Vietnam. He wasn’t even eighteen years old.
When Rich’s unit marched through the steamy jungles, through rivers and streams, cutting through dense tropical undergrowth, Rich learned something about fatigue. And loneliness. And fear.
Then it happened. It was hot. Like wearing an overcoat in a steam bath, Rich said.
Alone, apart from his comrades, Rich crouched low. His eyes searched the shadows, the bush. He heard the subtle snap a twig break just next to him. Startled, he turned, pointing his weapon. There staring back was the enemy. Face to face. An NVA (North Vietnamese Army) soldier – with startled fear in his eyes that matched his own. Just inches away.
They stood, frozen with fright, waiting for the other to make the first move. Each aiming a deadly weapon with mortal intent. Each with a finger on the trigger. Today this pivotal moment is replayed in Rich’s mind in slow motion. It seemed an eternity.
Relying on the instincts programmed into his young mind from intense basic training Stateside, Rich pulled the trigger of his AK 47 and dropped to the ground. His automatic rifle, now a crackling machine gun, accomplished its lethal purpose. Rich stood up. In a terrifying instant, the alarmed enemy soldier lay bloody and lifeless at Rich’s feet.
Whatever innocence remained in young Rich Luttrell’s heart vanished a momentary firefight. Gone forever.
* * * * * * * *
It was Rich Luttrell’s first kill.
Not so the others. As the gun roared out, Rich’s GI buddies hit the ground. In the silence that followed, the other young veterans of jungle warfare pushed Rich aside and swarmed over the dead body of the fallen Vietnamese soldier. They searched him for valuables. One tossed a wallet aside after emptying its contents of cash.
Falling out of the wallet was a tiny photograph. It fell at Rich’s feet. He reached down to the damp soil next to his boot, and slowly picked up the picture. He wiped the fear from his eyes with the back of his hand, and took a deep breath. His heart still raced from the adrenaline jolt.
It was a soldier in the picture, standing
ramrod straight, looking into the camera, no smile, dressed in the
distinctive green uniform of the North Vietnamese Army.
Beside the soldier, a small child.
A girl. With pigtails. A frilly white dress. Also
looking into the camera. The two
leaned towards each. The soldier
and the little girl.
Rich slipped the picture into his own wallet. The man he killed in the heat of battle had a little girl back home… waiting for her daddy to return, Rich thought. He never would.
The photo stayed in Rich’s wallet for over twenty-five years.
Like many other American GI’s, Rich would face more deadly encounters. This was just the first of many jungle firefights. Rich survived them all until months later when a stray bullet to the shoulder ended Rich’s tour of duty. His wound brought him home.
To this day, he wonders why he lived, and so many others died.
* * * * * * * *
Duery
Felton is curator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. DC.
Carolyn
and I visited that simple, stately and emotionally charged memorial last
September. For a long time, it has
been a sacred gathering place for veterans to reconnect with the wounds of the
past. Memories that will not go
away. Fallen comrades.
The harsh realities of an awful war.
As
you stroll along the polished marble wall and read what appears to be the
random list of countless names (there are over fifty-thousand), fellow visitors
observe a reverential hush. You’ll
hear muffled sobs. A sniffle.
You’ll see tears wiped away from reddened eyes.
A man tracing a name carved in the stone.
A woman beside a grieving man, rubbing the back of his neck offering
affirmation and encouragement. “It’s
ok, honey, let it go,” you’ll hear her say.
But
mostly you are taken by the sheer magnitude of the suffering and violence and
loss of not just the Vietnam War… but war in general.
You are impacted by the dreadful sacrifice of so many for the cause of
our nation’s well being.
Every
day, people leave their memories at the long base of the Memorial in the form
of notes and letters and flowers and candles and other such trinkets.
Duery
Felton’s job was to collect those mementos and move the non-perishables to
permanent storage in the memorial archives.
One in particular caught his eye. He
wrote about it when he published his book, Offerings at the Wall.
It
was a photograph and a letter, tucked away in a clear zip lock bag. The photo looked like a father and daughter… a little girl
and a soldier. Felton recognized
the uniform of the North Vietnamese Army.
A distinctive shade of green. Thirty
years before, Felton knew that uniform as the trademark of his enemy.
And there he stood, leaning towards his lovely pig-tailed daughter.
Neither smiled.
The
handwritten letter with the photo in the bag was unsigned.
It was addressed to the soldier in the picture.
“I’m sorry I killed you,” the letter began.
Duery was touched by the simple candor of the opening line.
The letter went on. “You
were a brave and noble soldier. I
don’t know why I fired first. I
know you understand that I was doing what I was trained to do.
I have carried your picture in my wallet for over twenty-five years.
You had a beautiful daughter. I
do not know her name or yours. I
am very sad whenever I think about your little girl, and that she grew up
without you. Often, when I look at
my own two daughters, I feel a pain in my heart because you were not there for
yours. I wonder if you had other
children. I pray that she is
well.”
The
Curator, moved by the simple words of an unknown fellow soldier determined that
he would highlight the sentiment of the handwritten confessional note with the
haunting photograph in his book.
Richard Luttrell and his wife Carole thought they left behind those memories the day they laid down the zip lock bag at the base of the Memorial on their one and only trip to Washington, DC. Then a colleague at the Veterans Administration in Illinois where Rich worked walked into his office with a copy of the new book Offerings at the Wall.
Page fifty-three – there was the letter and the photo staring back at Rich.
*
* * * * * * *
Just this year, Richard Luttrell, accompanied with by his wife Carole, boarded an off-road vehicle bound for a little hamlet two hours outside Hanoi. He carried the photo returned to him by Curator Felton.
There are eighty million Vietnamese. It took nearly ten years, but in a miraculous series of arbitrary events, which began with the publishing of “Offerings at the Wall,” Rich found the little girl.
Her name is Lan. She has a brother, Nguyen Van Hue. Their father - Nguyen Trong Ngoan – is the man who died on that steamy jungle battlefield at the other end of Rich Luttrell’s AK 47 in 1967. Lan was six when she and her father stopped by a little Hanoi storefront photographer for a keepsake picture. The daddy slipped the only copy into his wallet when he went off to fight. Today she is nearly forty.
“I’d almost rather face combat again than face this girl,” he said.
But he did.
As
they arrived, Lan and her family waited in a village courtyard.
As Rich entered in, they embraced.
They wept. With his wife
Carole looking on, Rich repeated a line he learned in Vietnamese.
He stumbled through, but the message was clear.
“Today I return the photo I’ve kept in my wallet for thirty-three
years. I’m sorry.
I hope you will forgive me.”
She did.
Through a translator, Rich adds, “Your father was a noble soldier. He died a brave man and a courageous warrior. And he did not suffer.”
Correspondent Keith Morrison, who covered the story for “Dateline NBC,” added this commentary – “Thirty-three years ago, Richard Luttrell came to Vietnam to make war. Today he returned and made peace. He left behind the photo and his demons, too. And the ghost of that sad little girl is finally gone, replaced by a woman who survived her father’s death and forgave the man who killed him.”
*
* * * * * * *
Leaders carry their own baggage. Often times it’s heavy.
You are a leader. Your attitudes, your self-concept, your outlook… all are shaped by powerful moments that may have come and gone in minutes. Maybe decades back. But you remember them as if they were yesterday.
Few know your secrets. But you do.
You’ve been carrying them as a wallet photo for years. Right there by your side. The image is haunting. And real.
Go ‘head. Take a long look. Let the meaning sink in. Talk to a trusted friend.
You are not branded like cattle. You are not stuck. There is a place for healing. And grieving the loss. And finding resolution. And wholeness. These are matters of the heart.
Ask Rich Luttrell. He found it in an unlikely place.
But it made him whole again.
You can, too.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
The story of Richard Luttrell was aired on Dateline NBC Tuesday May 2, 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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