Bringing It All Back Home by Philip F. Napoli Read Free Book Online

association there.
    Like Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July , Eggers was invited by his hometown to be the grand marshal of the Memorial Day Parade. He agreed. The parade was the impetus for him to make his first visit back to Larchmont, and he has very warm memories of what took place. As he was dropped off at the arranged meeting place where the parade would begin, you would’ve thought God walked in.
    He remembers being saluted and the pride that his father and father-in-law expressed.
    I was proud, too. What the hell. I didn’t know why I was there. I thought there were other people a lot more deserving of it than me. But there I was, the grand marshal of the blasted parade!
    Eggers was not given a medical discharge. Apparently, his arm was not damaged enough, and he had time left on his military commitment. In early June 1966 he got orders to head to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he became a company commander. And he loved it. Still, as he puts it, he was prime meat to go back to Vietnam, and he didn’t want to.
    He could have stayed in. He and his wife discussed it, but he had had enough of dead bodies. In addition, the Eggerses’ second child had a serious case of bacterial pneumonia, and he just didn’t want to be apart from his family at that time.
    I liked the concept of the service; I was good at it; I was comfortable in it; my wife liked it too. We got to travel a little bit and do this and do that.
    But Eggers was having doubts about America’s involvement in the war. To him, it didn’t seem that the country was committed to winning. He says:
    The only way that this was going to be stopped was that we had to virtually take out Hanoi. If you want to kill the spider, you’ve got to get the spider in his nest. But there wasn’t anybody out there who wanted to do it. That political risk internationally was way too big.
    So, in early January 1968, he left the Army. Eggers went on to work for an insulation company and bought a home in Rockland County, New York. For the better part of two decades he didn’t tell anyone he had served in Vietnam. If somebody started to talk about it in a conversation, I just sat there. I never said I was or wasn’t.
    Eggers didn’t want to get into a political discussion with anyone. He was just happy that his war had ended and that he had survived. Then things changed a little. The war ended in 1975, and Eggers’s brother-in-law returned from Vietnam. He had had a very bad time as a medic, though Eggers declines to say more, and died at age forty-five.
    His brother-in-law’s struggles led Eggers to begin talking more about his experiences. He took some goading and at times had to defend himself: I said, “Look, I was just a soldier. I didn’t kill any babies that I know of; I was just a soldier; that’s all I was.”
    Though he was no longer silent about his combat experience, Vietnam was still mostly out of his everyday thoughts until 1991, when several things happened. First, the Gulf War began. It seemed to Eggers that the country was entering the Gulf War with the determination to win quickly and definitively that he hadn’t sensed in Vietnam. He remembers imagining what it would be like to return to the service.
    That triggered something deep, deep inside of me, that I could no longer deny that part of my life.
    Another factor was Eggers’s younger son, who was learning about the Vietnam War in high school and asked his father to tell him more about his experiences.
    For the first time, I said, “Okay, but you better have some time.” And I don’t know how many hours we talked. Over time I seemed to find a place inside of me that was more accessible. Gradually, it began to come out of me, and I began to talk about it to other people, if they asked. It became a source of pride eventually. But it was hard fought.
    In the late 1990s he got a Purple Heart license plate for his car. Not long