The Beatles' Rubber Soul album is playing now (the original version without "Drive My Car"). Several years ago I had transferred it from vinyl to CD, and I just rediscovered it lost in the back of the cabinet. The song "Norwegian Wood" reminded me of Warren. One of my great regrets and failures. For some reason, that song fascinated him. He kept trying to analyze it.
I met him when I lived in Gettysburg. I was married to Ex#1 then, Ex#1 who was off in Germany and then Seattle, living with other women, and, oh yeah, serving his country. Warren was also Army, and was stationed just up the road. He was a sad case. He needed a Mommy. I had just lost a baby and needed something to mother. Ironically, he was from Tacoma. He was tallish and thinish and cutish with a very sharp and strange and fascinating mind. He had a serious drinking problem. The only places to go off the base were bars, so I didn't mind that he and two of his friends from the base spent a lot of time in my apartment, just playing cards and watching TV and generally hanging out.
I don't remember the name of one of the friends, but the other was Jim. Jim was one of those Mid-western farm boys, soft and gentle and polite, a reader and philosopher. The other two, no-name and Warren, used to alarm me by discussing the best ways to commit suicide. I always thought they were kidding, until one day the three of them announced that they had all put in for transfers. Warren and no-name had actually requested Viet Nam. This was 1967. Suicide. Jim had requested Germany. Their transfers went through. Warren and no-name went to Germany. Jim went to Viet Nam.
Warren and Jim wrote to me, and I wrote to them - at least one letter a week, often more. Jim's letters revealed a crush on me, which I tried to gently discourage. Then one day Jim's letters stopped, and I assumed he'd finally found himself a girl.
Warren kept up the correspondence until he got out of the army. By then I was divorced from Ex#1. He came directly to me, did not go home to Tacoma and his anxious parents. He applied for a job with the company I was working for, and a few others in the area, but he had not finished his degree (and the market was bad in this area, anyway) and nobody was hiring. I suggested that he go home, visit his parents, and look into finishing college.
He stayed with me for about two months, and yeah, we did get "involved", but remember this was 1968, tie-dyed t-shirts, free love, pre-AIDS, the original Woodstock was just around the corner, we attended a Jimi Hendrix concert at the local Armory in a small intimate room. (All concerts then were small and intimate - no arenas or stadiums.) It was a different and special time. Maybe it wasn't THE "summer of love", but back then, they all were.
So finally, he went to Tacoma to figure out what he wanted to do next. I got a few letters and calls from him, and then didn't hear from him for a while. So one day I called his parents, just to find out what he was up to. The reaction I got from his mother was unexpected. She seemed to think that he and I were engaged, that there was a great and torrid love affair. She seemed to think that I had broken it off.
She said they were very worried about him, that he was drinking heavily again, that he was disappearing for days at a time, and that I was the only person who could save him. She wanted me to write him a letter telling him I loved him, asking him to get it together and to stop drinking, for me. She practically begged me. She said she would have called me sooner, but she didn't have my number or address. I said, uh, ok, and hung up without giving her my number.
I never wrote the letter. Never called again. Never heard from him again. I can't find any mention of him on the internet. I still wonder what happened to him. He had a brilliant mind. I liked him, but I didn't love him, and I couldn't pretend I did. I didn't want to deal with his drinking. I stepped back, away from him. I still feel guilty about that.
In 1983, I visited The Wall in Washington, DC. At that time, I knew only one person who had actually gone to Viet Nam. Everybody I knew, my circle, had gotten deferments. So I looked for that one name, Jim.
He was there, on the wall.
He had been sitting on a riverbank writing letters when he was hit, only a few days after his last letter to me. He died of his injuries a few years later, during the summer of love.
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