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Where Have
You Gone Charming Billy??
William
Edwin Carter
We played little league baseball together, and spent our Saturdays at the YMCA swimming and playing whatever sport was appropriate for the season … budding jocks to be sure. He didn't mind that I played piano and spent hours at the local Library … I didn't mind that he played trombone and was obsessed with girls from the time he was 11 years old. Billy was very smart, but never gave a fuck about school … ever. He was from a working-class family … his dad was a brick mason, and his mom…like so many women in the late '50s and early '60s … was a housewife. Billy became an anomaly in our small town, because his parents got a divorce. Big deal, you might say, everybody gets divorced … everybody … but not then, and definitely not there. Billy was the only kid that I knew who had divorced parents, and I knew almost everybody. He was never the same after his parents split up. He was a handsome devil, and he started collecting girlfriends like he used to collect baseball cards. His mouth was like a rapier, and he got me into more than one fight because of it. You might ask why I would put up with someone so clearly over the edge … it is quite simple … he was my friend … generous to a fault, and as good a friend as a guy would ever want to have. After high school, we parted ways … although I still saw him often on weekends and holidays. I went to college, and he went to work in factory that produced fire-proof insulation … why was it fireproof ? … because it was full of asbestos. He often volunteered for overtime to clean the asbestos vats … if he hadn't been murdered in Vietnam, he probably would have died long ago of lung cancer … sigh. It was 1967,
I turned 18 in June and he in July, and both of us dutifully registered
for the Draft … the Selective Service … a collective nightmare
for every 18 to 26 year old male in the country. The Vietnam conflict
was in full stride then … we had about 500,000 soldiers there,
and the body count was staggering. To tell the truth, I was never too
worried about being drafted … I had a duodenal ulcer, and figured
that I would flunk the He was sent to Vietnam as an infantryman … a grunt in late August, and less than one month later, he was murdered by the United States government. No … he did not give his life for his country … he was just a confused, misguided KID who didn't know his ass from first base, and it got him dead … the same as 58,000 other American GIs, and about 1 million Vietnamese … when it was all said and done, Vietnam … fell to the Vietnamese. The Vietnam War Memorial, designed by Maya Lin (a Yale undergraduate at thetime) was dedicated in 1982. I knew about the wall of names, the rift in the earth symbolizing the rift in our national fabric, the black granite … but I couldn't bear to go there … not until 1997. When I finally did go … it was not cathartic … yes I wept uncontrollably when I saw Billy's name on that wall ... I took a photograph, and left a pack of Camel non-filters … (to this day, he is the only person I ever knew who smoked more than I do) … but none of it removed the vile taste in my mouth. I am still filled with rage when the U.S. government wants to play fast-and-loose with the lives of young men and women for the sake of some misguided military adventure. As Bush rattles the sabers and prepares to let loose the dogs of war in Iraq … please remember the short life and senseless death of Billy Carter … nothing left but a handful of nothing medals, a small gravestone, and a name on a wall. He was my friend, and you are so right…it is personal.
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