Andrew Wiest - Charlie Companys Journey Home: The Forgotten Impact on the Wives of Vietnam Veterans

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family to my wife Jill Wiest and our wonderful children Abigail, Luke, and Wyatt. Without them, nothing would be possible.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

It was like a scene from a movie, but it was all too real. Noemi Sauceda stood transfixed, as the sights and sounds of her home slipped into background obscurity. The soft whir of the ceiling fan as it struggled against the Texas heat; the ubiquitous pictures mounted on the wall with infinite care that chronicled married life images of the important moments in the lives of her children Jose, Omar, and Belinda. Elementary school graduation. Vacations. But the familiar sights were momentarily forgotten in a moment of blinding, transfixing terror.

Noemi had seen handguns before. In Texas, guns, from handguns to heirloom hunting rifles, were everywhere. But she had never seen the barrel of a gun look so big; so big that it seemed to swallow the entire room. That barrel seemed to melt her very soul. The gun was a pistol, she didnt know the brand or make, and it was held in the hand of her husband Jose. The sweat from a hard day of work played around Joses features as his brow furrowed in a deep, black anger mixed with a look of confusion. The hand clutching the gun shook and trembled. She absently wondered if shaking so badly could cause the gun to fire, ending her life. Maybe Jose was talking, perhaps even yelling. But whatever words passed his lips were ignored, meaningless sucked into the void created by the cold blue steel of the pistol barrel.

Living along the Mexican border, the residents of Mercedes, Texas were familiar with and wary of violence. As a police officer, Vietnam veteran Jose Sauceda was something of a connoisseur of physical threat; he had it down to a science. Coyotes smugglers of people, with their desperate human cargo often tightly packed in the sweltering heat of a van or the nearly airless trailer of an 18-wheeler usually preferred to ditch their freight at the first sign of danger. Flight abandoning their hapless customers as a diversion, leaving the American cops to clean up the human mess let the Coyotes live to smuggle another day. Drug smugglers were another matter. There were those smugglers, maybe high on their own product, who ditched and ran. But to others the smuggling professionals their shipment was worth more than their lives. Those smugglers were dangerous. Deadly dangerous. Sauceda knew the risks and was good at his job. But the stress was palpable. On this particular summer evening the stress had been too much. There must have been a proximal breaking point. A word out of place the onset of an argument. Perhaps the worn and rehearsed arguments that become commonplace in a marriage that has endured the decades. The causation, though, would be forever lost in the event itself. Jose had drawn his weapon and had it trained on his own wife.

Noemi had lived a guarded childhood. Her father Luiz drove an 18-wheeler delivering Jax Beer across southern Texas, while her mother Viola worked for the local water department and did her best to raise their three children. Even though she was the eldest, Noemi had always felt a bit left out. As an asthmatic she remembered sitting in the window watching wistfully as the other children played and romped through the neighborhood. But everything had changed when she was 15 everything changed the day that she met Jose Sauceda. Noemi had long known that there was no such thing as fairy tales, but it had been love at first sight. She knew that he was the one pretty much from the first moment he strolled into her field of vision. As a migrant worker Jose had a strong build, wiry but with just enough muscle to draw her eyes for a second, lingering look. Jet-black hair that hung down near his eyes framed his face perfectly a face that was almost always smiling. It was one of those honest smiles, the smile of a true friend. It was that smile, the ready humor, the constant willingness to help that had won Noemi over in the end. Jose Sauceda was a good person the kind of person you can trust with your life. The kind of person you want to marry.

That same person now stood in front of Noemi with a pistol. The ready smile had been replaced by something that looked more like a grimace of pain. His nightmares had begun soon after he had returned from Vietnam the kind of nightmares where he yelled and punched in his sleep. More like night terrors. Sometimes he dropped to the floor at loud noises. Noemi never asked him about the war, though, and he never offered information. The experience of war, whatever that was, was a part of his past, not of his present. The present meant the hard work of raising a family and holding down jobs. Once, though, things had gotten so bad that Jose had gone to the Veterans Administration seeking some kind of help. But they had told him that he was fine. No help was needed. But here he stood, with the nightmares of sleep having overtaken his waking mind. Here he stood with a gun pointed at her. That smiling teenager was gone. The jokes and good humor had fallen silent, stilled by the demons that haunted Joses memories. Even as her thoughts focused on that barrel and how to remain alive, Noemi couldnt help but wonder what kind of bloody past had reached into the present to transform her husband so fully and so frighteningly.

Jose had never talked about Vietnam. It had always been there, and Noemi knew that the war had been a powerful and transformative experience. But she never knew why. Jose had guarded her from Vietnam and what had happened there. He had built a wall between his memories and his family a wall that he hoped would keep his family protected from what he had seen and done. There had been good times in Vietnam, good times of camaraderie and the boozy fellowship shared with young men at war, especially with his best friends Forrest Ramos and Jim Cusanelli. But those good times were nowhere to be found on this night.

His eyes werent quite focused, more as if he was looking through Noemi instead of at her. Joses consciousness didnt stop to make specific note of the visions that flickered through his mind, to grab at the memories of Vietnam that flowed past in a torrent. Amid the mental frenzy, the tropical sun bore down on a forlorn rice paddy in the Mekong Delta. It was 1967 and the small-unit war was slowly ripping Charlie Company to pieces, one day, one sniper, one booby trap at a time. Suddenly fire erupted from seemingly everywhere at once. Joses 3rd Platoon of Charlie Company, 4th Battalion of the 47th Infantry, was caught in an L-shaped ambush. Machine guns and small arms roared their greeting as Charlie Company faced its first test of battle. Jose dove face first into a small canal, the type used to irrigate the rice paddies, crashing down near his friend Jim Cusanelli. It was a symphony of fear, adrenaline, and activity. The world had shrunk down to just two men, Jose and Jim. What was going on 20 feet away might as well have been happening on Mars. Their attention was fixed to their front, to the incoming fire, to the Viet Cong they could see in nearby bunkers. Their attention was fixed on survival. The war and the world had narrowed to a stark focus on the few square feet that mattered in what was a moment of life or death.

Suddenly a Viet Cong soldier stood up. Actually stood up a suicidal action in a battle where bullets buzzed by from all directions. The movement barely had time to register in Joses consciousness. His focus narrowed to a single point. Even the harsh sounds of battle seemed to still. The Viet Cong had a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher aimed directly at him. In a burst of fire the rocket grenade left the tube and sped toward him. It seemed like time had stopped. How could something so fast move so slowly? The grenade split the air between Jose and Jim Cusanelli and impacted the side of the canal just a foot or two away. He was dead; life was over. Did his eyes close waiting for the roar of the warheads detonation? Did he stare at the hole in the bank of the canal to see the flash that preceded the white heat of the explosion that ended his life? It all happened too quickly for accurate memory creation. But the warhead didnt explode perhaps because the bank of the canal was a soupy, muddy mess. He and Jim were alive, a fleeting moment of transcendent joy that he couldnt even pause to register. The desperate fighting continued, and Jose remained in mortal danger.