War takes boys about to be men

COLUMN GOSIER E-mail: Click here Archive

By ELIJAH GOSIER

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 5, 2000

[Times photo: Jonathan Newton] Robert Adukoski, who was awarded two Purple Hearts while serving in Vietnam, relives the war every day. Here he wipes away tears during a Memorial Day ceremony before the Devil Rays game May 29.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to understand that you don't understand.

As a boy about to become a man, at that time when youthful idealism struggles to hold off the brutal onslaught of unsympathetic reality, I had a muddled concept of what war was.

Everybody had some concept of war, and most of them were probably just as muddled as mine. It was 1968 and war was Vietnam.

Just a few years earlier, however, war had been a game I played walking through the woods and fields of the Georgia farm I grew up on, singing When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, pretending I was a war hero leading my platoon home after victory. My imagination never even bothered to come up with an identity for my vanquished enemy.

Televised coverage of the Vietnam War didn't do much to clear up my youthful muddle. The black and white images on the television my oldest, married sister had given the family when she got a new one were of people and places too far from Quitman, Ga., to care about.

It didn't help that my view of those images was usually distorted by the position from which I viewed them: Lying on the floor with my finger in the control panel manipulating the vertical-hold knob so the rest of the family didn't have to watch a constantly rolling picture.

The war became real for me during the Christmas break from my freshman year at college. That's when somebody told me Charlie Rose had gotten both his legs blown off over there.

Charlie Rose?

Charlie had been my catcher through high school and sandlot baseball years. He had been my classmate. Beyond that, he was a good kid. Even in the '60s in rural Georgia, a time and place where good behavior was the norm, especially among the boys who played baseball, Charlie Rose stood out. He always seemed ready to smile and never got mad, even though he competed with intensity.

It was hard to imagine Charlie without his legs.

It was hard to imagine me without mine.

It bothered me that grades, his mediocre ones and my good ones, were the difference between us that had cost him his legs and allowed me to keep mine. Grades limited his career choices: The paper mill in Clyattville, the metal products plant, the cotton mill or Langdale's lumber yard in Valdosta.

Or he could join the Army.

I started feeling something uncomfortable, almost painfully so. I think it was guilt. He tried so hard for the grades that came so easily for me. It didn't seem fair.

From that point on, Charlie Rose defined war for me, the cruelty of it, the unfairness of it, the randomness with which it changes lives. Whenever a Memorial Day came or war veterans were recognized in some other way, Charlie Rose has always come to mind.

Then I met Robert Adukoski.

I eventually told Big Bob the Charlie Rose story.

"It could have been worse," he said matter-of-factly. He didn't say it coldly, or uncaringly. Just matter-of-factly.

His response surprised me, caught me off guard, maybe angered me a little.

Over the years, the story has always elicited a sympathetic nod or some other reaction that seemed more compassionate than Bob's.

Bob is a Vietnam veteran. When he was a boy about to become a man, he didn't have to wade through a muddled concept of what war was; it was that thing that had him surrounded.

He spent a year in Vietnam, and has fought the war for 30 more. He was awarded two Purple Hearts, but he doesn't display them. One of them was earned when a blast left him one of few survivors in the midst of body parts that seconds earlier were his friends.

"They got Purple Hearts, too," he said. "I don't wear mine and I'm not proud of them, with people dying around me. I don't deserve them."

Bob, who says he was "a skinny kid from Philly" when he went to Vietnam at 21, will be 53 this week and tips the scale near 300 pounds. He says there isn't a day that goes by without him spending part of it in Vietnam. Sometimes it's just moments, at other times, it awakens him at night, sometimes it keeps him awake for days. Few of his conversations escape some mention of the war.

Sometimes he cries, not fully understanding why. Bob isn't shy about telling anyone that he's a 100 percent-disabled Vietnam Vet, with all his limbs.

"They pay me for being crazy," he says.

"But I'm better now," he adds, always with a laugh.

The laugh is deceptive. He is better now. After returning from Vietnam to less than a hero's welcome, he spent years a breath away from being another one of the Vietnam veterans who man street corners and park benches. He wanted to avoid being around people. The soldiers he had served with were his family, the South Vietnamese had seemed more appreciative than his own countrymen did. Then he sought and got help from the Veteran's Administration.

Now he is gregarious, quick with a joke and even quicker to confront anything that smacks of hypocrisy. He has been a season-ticket holder since the Devil Rays came to town and when he misses a game, fans in section 118 ask about him.

"There is help if you want it," he tells other veterans who are where he used to be.

This Memorial Day, I accompanied Bob to a baseball game and watched tears roll down his cheek during a short tribute to POW/MIAs and during the National Anthem.

This Memorial Day, there was more to think about than Charlie Rose and the legs he lost in Vietnam.

I thought about all the boys about to be men who lost themselves there. I thought about all the boys on the verge of becoming men who are still there, no matter where in the world they might be.

And I also thought about how proudly Big Bob should wear his Purple Hearts.

Elijah Gosier's column appears periodically in Floridian. He lives in St. Petersburg. Write him c/o the St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731.

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