.....

      When we headed to Washington D.C. to attend the poetry reading that afternoon in 

April 1993, I had no idea I was going to find Joe Ramos.  I didn’t know I was looking for 

him then, but when I found his name etched into a granite slab in the Vietnam Memorial, 

my reality changed as did what I thought I knew about my own life.

      Four of us were early for the reading at the Reformation Church across from the Folger 

Gallery and my friend asked if we’d like to visit Albert Einstein.  She parked the car easily 

and led us to the huge bronze metal body of the elderly physicist, reclining so that visitors 

can climb onto his limbs.  The park was quiet.  After a few minutes relaxing in the lap of 

genius, my younger friend asked if I’d like to visit the Vietnam Memorial across the street.  

My reply was a casual, “Sure.”  Three members of our group had been born while that war 

was being fought and they could not know how different from theirs my reaction to the 

memorial would be.  I didn’t tell them I’d avoided this experience for almost twenty years.  

This seemed as good a time as any to change that.  As if to partake of yet another museum, 

we strolled together across the road toward a small group of people.

      The memorial was indeed a slash in the earth.  After I’d looked up several names in the 

ledger to determine during which year they had been killed, we entered on the left side of 

the V, and descended down a ramp sunk into the earth, at an angle just steep enough to 

make us move toward the center.  At first, the wall’s knee-high granite slabs which list the 

dead of the war’s last years seemed only reminders of what had been happening in my life 

in 1970, in ’73, and ’74.  But, as we walked slowly along the wall,  the increasingly taller, 

wider slabs loomed high over our heads, completely filled with names of those killed during 

the most intense years of the war.  The sense of having entered a place from which I could 

not escape was almost overpowering.  For years I had avoided coming here, and now, going 

down the walkway, I didn’t want to look at the names, nor at any of the mementos resting 

at the bottom of the wall where the sidewalk and the granite slabs meet.  A plastic Collie 

dog, six inches long, resting below the year 1971, intruded on my gaze.  Near it stood a man 

whose shoulders vibrated with sobs.  Slowly, I kept moving down the ramp, unable now to 

resist searching for three names etched into the stone.  As I looked more and more closely, 

the faces of  my three acquaintances and bits of conversation from the past flashed through 

my head and I forgot why I’d originally come to Washington this day.

      I was ascending the opposite side of the V and was almost at the end of it when I found 

Joe Ramos listed in1967.  I stared as a little rectangle bearing his name, solid and even 

along its edges, lifted off the granite.  It hung in the air for several seconds and then receded 

back into the stone.  Joe, whom I thought had returned and was aging somewhere in New 

Jersey, had been killed in Vietnam in 1967.  Briefly, I wondered if this could be the same 

Joe I’d known, but during the seconds his name was suspended in front of the slab, I heard 

two voices chatting inside my head, in a conversation muffled by time.  A layer of awareness 

came alive all over my body just under the surface, not uncomfortable, not painful, just 

buzzing for a moment, confirming a fact.  The distinct impression that I had known Joe 

was dead, that my body knew it as well as my mind, pulled me further inside myself and 

away from the waning late afternoon light slanted across the shiny wall.

      One voice in the conversation was that of Auggie, the husband of my friend Jenny.  He 

said, “Joe bought it.  He stepped on a land mine and bought the farm.”  The other voice was 

mine. “What?! Joe Ramos? What?!” 

      Auggie said something I couldn’t hear and then “...blew him to pieces.”

      I had been carrying this message around for twenty-six years.  Now that I knew it, and 

could hear it, my chest ached and my throat was tight.  I kept swallowing.  A few tears were 

making their way down my face, but time had dried out a lot of that.

      I met Joseph Ramos in Watertown, New York in 1966.  I was a student nurse, soon to 

graduate from the hospital school of nursing where I had trained for three years.  Joe was 

one of a platoon of young Army draftees who were stationed for nine months at Camp Drum 

(now Fort Drum), an expansive military base about ten miles north of the city, and were 

training to go to Vietnam as infantry.  They called themselves "grunts", the ones (as they 

said) who took up the slack  for the officers and the other men in less danger than they. 

They sounded proud of this duty. 

      We met at Gene's Inn, the local drinking and dancing barn where a bottle of beer cost 

fifty cents and could be made to last all evening.  Student nurses had little money other 

than the change gathered out of coat pockets, or a few dollars left over from a meager scholar-

ship.  Every Friday and Saturday night, a group of us dressed up in sleeveless turtlenecks 

and bell-bottomed jeans, pooled our coins and went to Gene's and sat around a table together 

sipping bottled-beer.  Our nursing school instructors had made clear their disapproval of 

students frequenting this night-spot.  “Nice” girls were not supposed to date the military men 

who came to town, but the ratio at Gene’s Inn was twenty men to every woman and we were 

there to dance with the soldiers we selected.

      Unlike the 12,000 members of the Army and Air Force reserves who came to Camp Drum 

every summer for two-week stints, Joe and his friends moved in a world more akin to ours.  

The "two-week wonders" (as we’d dubbed the reservists) came to town to do their "duty."  

Many of them were married and had families and professions and other responsibilities they 

left at home for a two-week drunk and as much sex as they could get without remembering 

the details.  For the most part the student nurses avoided them (we'd been warned by the 

dutiful housemother and our upper classmates), except when we went out in groups hoping 

to talk to any man who wasn't from Watertown.  And when we met them we spoke to them 

with a certain naive disdain. 

      At first, Joe Ramos and his friends seemed to be part of the same frenzied group of men 

driven to find a way to relieve their tension.  But soon, we understood that when the two-week 

wonders left by late July, these fellows would still be around completing their last few months 

of war exercises.  We became friends with seven or eight of them, and they liked the half dozen 

of us who were about to begin living in our own apartments after three years in a dormitory 

with sixty women.  The tension between our two groups was just right.  We danced and partied 

together at night, went swimming at a favorite beach on Lake Ontario on days off, and drank 

and talked to each other for hours at a time.  We were the sons and daughters of working-class 

men and women.  Some of the guys had been in college and dropped out, worked for family 

businesses, or had enlisted in the Army after high school.  They seemed real, vital, beautiful 

and scared.  Later I sensed that being with us comforted them.  We were vital, fit and beautiful 

too, naive, but no longer innocent.

      By the time I was nineteen I had helped my first patient die.  She was a little older than my 

mother, a little brown-haired bird of a woman curled into the middle of her bed, a tiny failing 

sparrow who had given up the substance of herself to cancer, and to the air, or so it seemed.  

The morning I met her she was already dying, and escaped her body quickly just after I came 

on duty.  Thankfully, because I hadn't yet read any text on how to help someone pass out of this 

life.  She did it all by herself while I stood by the bedside, took her blood pressure for no earthly 

reason, and tried not to hyperventilate over the event. 

      As students, we had worked as regular staff nurses on the medical-surgical floors.  We 

listened to the chests of heart-attack victims whose fear that their hearts would stop kept them 

sweating all the time, and tried to assure them they would still be alive in the morning.  We 

changed surgical dressings on all parts of our patients' bodies.  We bathed homeless men 

crusted with feces, wanting to vomit from the smell of pestilence.  But we didn't.  We couldn't; 

we were nurses.

      On my first date with a soldier I had queried him about the metal dog tags dangling from 

the chain around his neck.

      "You have to wear them all the time?"

      "Yes," he replied, letting me look them over.  I ran my fingers across his name pressed into 

the thin smooth steel.

      "Everything is there," he said, "name, rank, serial number, date of birth.  Everything they 

need to identify me."  He continued, "If I die they shove this one," he picked up the larger tag, 

"between my teeth, so whoever comes along with the body bag will know who I am and where 

to send me."

      After that I heard a few other soldiers mention body bags from time to time.  I never knew if 

they were expressing their fear of ending up in one, or if the concept of a body bag offered some 

strange sense of security to those for whom staying whole could no longer be taken for granted. 

      Once, during our second year as nursing students, our school had taken us on a field trip 

in October out to the army base so we could learn about their emergency disaster plan.  The 

weather was cold and damp that day, and we passed a few jeeps filled with young men my age 

who kept smiling at us and whistling as they drove by.  I was freezing and anxious to get out 

of there, but the sergeant giving the tour took the class into a tent and spent another hour 

showing us how to use the tourniquets and bandages packaged for easy access for medics in 

the field.  I remember feeling secure again only when we returned to the warm, solid walls of 

the hospital.

      By the time I met Joe, my friends and I had already seen several friends and relatives off 

to Vietnam.  Most of them were still there, writing letters to us describing the terror of being 

twenty years old and expecting each day to be blown up or burned or shot.  We wondered if 

they were exaggerating.  They complained of the heat, of the food, of being unable to relax or 

sleep.  Sometimes they expressed the desire to be wounded in order to come home, or to avoid 

killing someone else.  Then, we still believed we were recipients of the good American dream.  

Killing wasn't supposed to be part of it.  We don't know yet that the war couldn't be won. There 

wasn’t enough time to watch the evening news or think about the politics plastered across the 

pages of the daily newspaper. 

      As student nurses we had already cared for a multitude of people, from young children 

dying in Babies Hospital in New York City to the strapping country men and women who 

presented themselves at the hospital in Watertown with broken bones, and the bumps and 

bruises of their rugged lives.  We kept vigil on each shift over the wiry, tenacious elderly who 

clung to the fibers of their lives long past any medical estimate of their time to live.  Still, 

while we knew how to stop bleeding and sew up wounds, and could tenderly cleanse and 

feed and comfort patients in Watertown, we could do nothing for our lovers and friends in 

Vietnam. We could only imagine what they wouldn’t describe in their letters—the flesh and 

bone fragments, the bleeding, young hearts pumping in crisis.  We imagined limbs missing.  

We imagined them unconscious, and we imagined them conscious, boarding the plane to 

return to the states. We tried to imagine the war was only a fantasy.  Every day, after our shift 

of working in the hospital, we congregated in the nurse's lounge on the third floor of our dorm 

and compared letters. 

       I saw Joe Ramos for the last time two nights before he shipped out.  A farewell party, the 

last one of the year, was in full swing for the guys who had finally received their orders.  I drove 

my white `63 Comet convertible through a gate in the wire fence surrounding a meadow near 

Lake Ontario.  A tall bonfire came into view as I bumped down the trail toward the water.  

Tree-sized logs were criss-crossed and burning on the flat rocks beside the lake, their heat 

wavering out on all sides.  Two kegs of beer had already been tapped in a thicket away from 

the fire when I arrived around ten o'clock.  I had been working in the hospital all day, lifting 

and moving two patients with broken hips and an unconscious man who had fallen off a roof.  

The fillings from his teeth had lodged in his throat. For hours we had worked to save his life.  

He wasn't expected to live.

      This night I didn't want to think about any of them.  Joe was leaving, and Bob and Peter, 

Hank and Mike.  Finally it had come down to another party.  This was late August; we had 

just graduated. The air was warm.  Some of the guys had taken off their shirts and were run-

ning around in cut-offs or shorts, gathering logs for the fire.  Others were dancing to the music 

from transistors and car radios.

      My friends and I sat at the edge of the flat rocks and talked and listened to the  lake's low 

waves lap beside us.  Hardly anyone mentioned Nam.  We were there to remember, to say 

good-bye, get a little drunk,--not  look ahead.  As evening became night we danced with one 

another, held each other, kissed, cried, laughed and sang, promised to write, promised to take 

care of ourselves.

      That night Joe Ramos was golden and brown.  The summer had tanned his skin and his 

toothy white smile flashed across a round smoothly-shaven face.  His wholesome good looks 

were accented by his dark eyes, always intense.  He was twenty.  I was twenty-one.  The months 

of field-training had made his whole body hard, his belly flat, his buttocks firm.  He was proud of 

the condition of his body. He thought he was prepared, expected to be in Vietnam for a year.  He 

expected to come back home to Jersey and help his father and brother run their grocery store.  

He wanted to get married to a black-haired woman from his home town and make some babies.  

He wanted time.  He wanted the stars.

      We stayed until the first hint in the sky of darkness fading.  Shivering, we watered out the 

fire, disconnected the kegs and lifted them into the trunk of someone's car.  The drive back to 

the barracks was silent.  With one last hug, and a kiss I dropped Joe off at his barracks as the 

birds were beginning to squawk in the trees along the narrow road out of the compound.  It was 

Sunday, and I slept.  On Monday morning I went back to work at the hospital and Joe and the 

others boarded an air transport troop carrier and landed in Southeast Asia twenty-eight hours 

later.  Two days after landing, they were set up in a steel Quonset hut outside of Khe San.

      I lost myself in working at the hospital for a while, honing my skills before moving on to 

a new job.  It seems now that I kept extremely busy.  I liked assisting with newborn deliveries.  

As the oldest of nine children I was intensely curious as to what would lead a woman to repeat 

the experience over and over.  Once I scrubbed with Dr. George for a difficult breach delivery.  

Standing beside him fidgeting  in scrub dress, cap and gown, my knees threatening to buckle, 

I felt an overpowering need to say something.  Suddenly, I realized he had been the doctor who 

delivered me--and my mother--, and I told him so, just as he was pulling the baby's shoulders 

through the birth opening.  He kept pulling, looked at me for a second in the eyes (which was 

all he could see over my mask) and, as he brought his eyes back to the baby, said, "I thought 

you looked familiar." 

      Everyone in the room laughed; the baby slid out; the mother's blood gushed once as I 

handed him the instruments he needed for tying and cutting the cord.  I was embarrassed 

for talking at such a moment, for being so awkward and inexperienced at helping a new 

person into the world.  I remember the baby's slick body was pink instantly, and the mother's 

legs, high in the stirrups, draped in heavy blue cotton surgical sheets, sheltered me as I stayed 

in my place beside the tray of sterile instruments.  The doctor handed the now bawling infant 

to another nurse and began to prepare his suture to sew up the mother's torn vagina.  I stood 

in the same place and watched silently as her bleeding subsided, until she was fixed back 

together--as long as I could, until the drapes were taken away and her legs were lowered and 

covered and she became the regular shape of a woman patient under white covers.  She was 

exhausted, perspiring slightly, turning up the corners of her mouth whenever someone men-

tioned her newborn son.  I helped her slide onto a stretcher and pushed her back to her room 

and helped her into bed.

      For a while I assisted with a birth in the delivery room almost every day.  As the months 

wore on, I thought I was becoming grownup and needed a new job.  I moved seventy miles 

away, to Syracuse, and worked in an Intensive Care Unit in a large medical center.  One day 

I was part of a team who worked on an eighteen-year-old male whose face had lost its shape 

against the dashboard of his car.  I worked twelve hours that day and got a speeding ticket on 

the way home.

      As time went on, letters came to my new address from Vietnam.  One letter from Joe said, 

"A lot of bullets flew over our foxhole last night.  I thought it would never end."  I wrote back: 

"I miss you."  During the next year, Joe was transferred twice.  I lost an address; my own 

changed.  Sometime, late in 1967, while I was adjusting to another new job at yet another 

hospital,  the conversation with Auggie took place.  "He stepped on a land mine...blown to 

bits..."

     Now I remembered asking about the others, too, and being told who had returned, who had 

lost his legs and who was alcoholic but alive.  I realized how hard I'd resisted thinking about 

that year until now.

      Standing with my friends in front of the Vietnam Memorial, the evening light now purple, 

and the air grown colder; shadows across the wall made the names harder to see.  I closed my 

eyes and the exchange in my head grew louder.

      "Are you sure about Joe?"

      "Yeah, he's NOT coming back....He was blown up.  He stepped on a land mine." 

      I heard Joe's laughter rise out of another cool evening, heard him saying my name, and 

when I opened my eyes his name was still on the wall, sunk back into the stone.  I tried to 

remember his face again, tried to conceive of him fragmented into the warm damp earth of the 

jungle--but a lot has happened since then.

The Cream City Review, Vol. 22.1, Fall 1997