We visited the traveling Wall yesterday.  A walk along those panels is never easy for me as there are too many names on those slabs that were from my Vietnam Battalion.  I was there in 1967, a distinctly difficult time for the US as combat operations were intense, building, and increasingly complex.  History tells us that those months were the prelude to the 1968 Tet Offensive but in 1967 we didn’t know that this was the objective.

One name on the Wall is especially poignant.  Corporal Jedh Barker was my best friend during the training that led to our deployment.  We met in the Infantry Training Regiment.  He was a good guy.  He was from a poor family in Park Ridge, New Jersey but he had enrolled at Fairleigh Dickinson in Madison, NJ after High School.  The cost was too much so he transferred to North Dakota State University where he played football.  Jedh was also a true patriot.  So, at the end of his sophomore year, he enlisted in the Marine Corps for a two year period.  Training in the Marine Corps was no fun.  We discovered that we had similar interests.  He wanted to become a teacher.  I had already graduated from College and was married.  He was close to being engaged to his childhood sweetheart.  When we were transferred to Staging Battalion at Camp Pendleton, we were in the same squad.  At the end of the training day, we would often just sit, exhausted, on top of a hill with a beer and talk about what we hoped to get out of life.  We talked about future jobs, family, and what we wanted to do after we got out of the Marine Corps.  He wanted to go back and finish College and then move west to teach.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but was leaning toward  a career in International Relations in the Foreign Service or maybe the CIA.  We both knew what was to come.  We were both 0341 mortarmen so expected to be assigned to a Mortar Platoon but we both were assigned to the Infantry in Vietnam.. We rode over together and then in our assignments he was sent to the Third Marine Division and I to the First.  He went to provide security at the Airwing in DaNang before heading north to join his Battalion.  After a few months, we lost touch and I didn’t know what had happened to him.  This was before the Internet resources.  Some time later, I learned that he had died falling on a grenade to save his squad during a firefight.  It wasn’t until 1997 when my first Grandchild was born that I learned via the internet where Jedh was buried.  He was in a cemetery not 20 minutes from my daughter’s house.  I immediately drove there and when I entered the cemetery saw an American flag.  I drove right to the flag and found his grave.  I sat there weeping while I told him my life’s story to that point.  I have never forgotten Jedh.  He was an optimistic guy who found a silver lining almost everywhere.  So, every Marine Corps Birthday, I drink a toast to my comrades fallen and especially to Jedh.  He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously by President Richard Nixon.