Friendship
Old Friends Never Really Change Too Much
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The highlight of my trip to Washington, D.C., a few years ago was visiting my old friend Coe.
I managed to get in a few sightseeing ventures first, such as walking across the Potomac to tour the graves at Arlington. Bad idea. It poured mournful buckets of rain as I stood near the base of the Tomb of the Unknowns, watching in fascination and sadness as a group of Gold Star mothers gathered for the umpteenth time to remember the sons they lost to war, some as long as 50 years ago.
But that was just a tourist's diversion until I was ready to meet Coe. My heart raced with anticipation as I caught the Metro for a cross-town ride to the appointed spot. |
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He'd been christened Carlton Coe Gray, but was never known as anything but Coe. He was decidedly short for his age, but he embodied an enviable combination of toughness and affability. In Little League once, I remember him barreling toward home from third base. Coe, all 5-feet-2 inches of him, bowled the catcher over, knocked the ball loose and scored the winning run. He then turned away from his cheering teammates to help the dazed player back to his feet. Even brushed the dirt off the kid's backside. And said "Sorry" as he trotted toward his bench.
My handy tourist's map showed I had only two more stops to go before I reached our rendezvous. I'd gotten an early start, but knew he would be waiting for me. |
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I found myself wondering what Coe would look like these days. Back then, he sported a '50s crew cut, even while his peers in the late 1960s were, in the vernacular, letting their freak flags fly. By the time the White Album came out, most American kids were draped in the fashion of those turbulent times -- bell bottoms, silver medallions and leather head bands. Coe stuck with his open-neck sport shirts and jeans.
In those days, before life demanded very much of us, he did so much for me. Taught me how to roller skate ("You've got to let go of that rail sometime, Dana"), handed me his paper route when the rigors of dating became too much and encouraged me to follow his lead of learning to play the trumpet.
Unlike me, he actually practiced. I remember walking by his house and hearing the sounds of soaring scales spilling from his open bedroom window. |
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Coe graduated from high school in 1968 and was virtually guaranteed a trip to Vietnam. He hastened the inevitable by enlisting. But he would never have contemplated breaking his own kneecap or going to Canada to escape service. For generations, every male member of his family had served in the military. For him, doing anything else was unthinkable.
So on Aug. 23, 1969, Coe began his tour of duty. He spent his first few months as a "mole," working two-week stints looking for tunnels by day and bivouacking in the jungle at night. Hellish work, he wrote to his parents. He was thrilled when orders came through promoting him to sergeant and making him a door gunner on a UH-1 Huey helicopter.
The quietest, nicest, most peaceful person I'd ever known was now manning a machine gun in the skies over Vietnam. From half a world away, the notion seemed almost comical. Even this many years later, the jarring irony of those images still makes me shake my head.
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The sleek Metro car pulled to a stop. I hopped out and walked up the concrete stairs toward the daylight. I stopped at a large directory just long enough to look up Coe's address and headed down the stone walkway toward it: "Panel 10W, Line 61."
I saw my reflection in the black granite wall as I made my way past clumps of wilting flowers and knots of whispering visitors. And there, between First Lt. Carl Avery Gray and Private First Class Charles Gonzie Gray, I finally found my old friend.
"You haven't changed a bit," I thought, carefully placing a piece of rubbing paper against the gleaming stone. "Same guileless smile, same trim haircut, still two days short of your 20th birthday."
Along with Coe, more than 6,000 American men and women died in Vietnam in 1970. The year before, it had been 11,614. And before that, 16,589.
Today, American tourists can mountain bike the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hike the hills of Hanoi and snorkel the Mekong Delta. The ones who never made it home, however, are as frozen in memory as they are in time. The same questions I had for Coe I had for all of them: Had they lived, what would they be doing these days? How would their lives have changed and evolved? Would they be married? Have kids? On and on.
But answers there were none. I left D.C. carrying only a rubbing of Coe's name from a stone etching every bit as indelible as the thoughts of our childhood together on Emerald Street.
Some time after I returned to Oregon, I logged on to the Internet and looked up the Web site for the Vietnam Veterans' Wall. It took a little while, but I finally found Coe's name among the 58,178 service personnel who perished in that undeclared war. When I clicked on a button to view comments about Coe, a message flashed back reading, "No information has yet been entered for this American HERO."
Well, there is now, because I just typed some in. And as for Coe's being a hero, well, I knew that long before my country did. |
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DANA TIMS is a staff writer for The Oregonian. You can reach him |
Dana Tims 
