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Hal is 72 years old. He has been married to Linda since 1970, the year he returned from Vietnam. Linda has had some health problems the past few years, but otherwise their lives together seem to have been blessed. Four healthy children, now grown and with children of their own. A nice house, no mortgage, and no debts. The couple's sound financial position is due in large part to Hal's ferocious work ethic. He worked as an electrical contractor for 50 years, retiring after his 70th birthday.
Hal has been a dutiful provider for his family. It was not unusual for him to work more than 80 hours a week: "I'd get up in the dark and come home in the dark, sometimes seven days a week. It was a good job for me. I worked on my own. Nobody told me what to do, and I didn't have to rely on anybody else. You know, I think sometimes I would go nearly a whole week without talking to anybody. I had commercial clients, mostly. They'd leave me a message and tell me what was wrong, I'd fix it, and then move on to the next job.”
For a while after his retirement, he didn't know what to do with himself: "Sitting around the house just wasn't an option. I get restless, antsy. I need something to do all the time." He converted the garage into a workshop and started experimenting with birdhouse designs. He threw himself into the project, learning everything he could about the behavior and nesting preferences of various bird species. He perfected several designs that he sells at craft fairs and farmers markets. "I don't make as much as I did when I was an electrician, but it keeps me pretty busy," he says. One reason his new pursuit takes so much of his time is that Hal refuses to use power tools for his woodworking: “They’d be faster, sure. But I just can’t take the noise of ‘em.”
When he isn't in his workshop, he's working in the yard or doing small home maintenance projects. With his wife's health problems, he has had to take on the grocery shopping and other errands as well: "That's a bit tough for me. I don't like crowds. But I figured out that the stores are the emptiest between 0945 and 1015, so that's my window — I'm in, and I'm out. I'll go once a week, but no more." When I asked what bothers him about grocery shopping, he said, "You know how the world is these days. You never know who's gonna pull out a gun and start shooting. Being in a line or in those aisles — I just feel trapped. Sometimes I feel like I can't breathe. I just have to get out of there. A couple of months ago, I was leaving the store and heading to my truck and — well, I don't know, it sounds crazy, and you won't understand, but, pushing that cart across that parking lot, I felt . . . I felt exposed. Like I was vulnerable. It felt just like in 'Nam when they'd come and pick us up after we’d been in the boonies for a week or so. You never felt so vulnerable as when you were running to get on those helicopters. I always felt like I was going to get shot right square in the back right then."
Hal came in to see me, because he hasn’t been sleeping well: “I try to work as hard as I can during the day, so that I’m so tired all I want to do is go to bed. But when the time comes, I start feeling — I don’t know — wired, I guess. My head starts spinning with all sort of things, and I just lay there for hours, thinking. And when I do fall asleep, damned if I haven’t started dreaming about Vietnam again. Sometimes it’s not so bad, like just sitting around and eating and talking with the guys I was buddies with . . . but then sometimes it turns, and I start thinking about how they got hit. There’s one time I dream about a lot. My buddy Rick, he was from Pensacola, Florida, he was in the APC ahead of mine, and we were heading towards this ‘ville, place we had been to a dozen times, nice place, good people, we’d buy food there — and I’m looking right at him, and then he’s gone. Just a flash of light, and then I can’t see anything, and I’m choking on smoke and dust, and I’m rolling around on the ground, trying to put out any flames on me if I’ve got ‘em, and running my hands up and down my legs, checking to make sure they’re still there.”
“They didn’t find much of Rick, and what they did find, they wrapped up in a rain poncho and tied it in a package. They couldn’t get me to talk sense for a while after it happened, so I guess they sent me for a rest. I carried that package back with me. I don’t remember what I ever did with it. Gave it to a corpsman, I guess.”
“It seems like now that I’m not working — at least not working like I used to — I’ve got more time to think about all that stuff from Vietnam that I wish I could have just boxed up and forgot. I never watched war movies or even movies with cops or where people get hurt. But it’s like I’ve got a war movie playing in front of my eyes all day long. And this feeling just won’t leave me — Why did I make it home, and all those other guys didn’t? They wanted to live just as much as I did. Hell, by the end of my tour, I’m not even sure I wanted to make it home at all. I was thinking that maybe it would be better if I just died here. What kind of person would I be, back in the world? Just a grouch who’s no fun to be around.”
