He was one of the “lucky ones” I guess and had served his entire tour at Cam Ranh Bay working in intelligence at the US Naval Air Facility there while I alternated between working with the Hmong, running Force Recon versions of LRRPs, ambushes, and doing interrogation of captured prisoners before sending them up the intelligence chain. He stayed at Parris Island for nearly a year and a half before his continual request for transfer to the European theater was finally approved and in early 1918 he shipped overseas. Instead I asked her “If your grandmother and my father were cousins what does that make us.”
Willamina paused for a second and then with a million candlepower smile said “Far enough apart so that we could get married in this State.”
I was struck almost speechless, something that rarely ever happens and then croaked out “Are you proposing to me” figuring to shake her up a bit. Unlike many others who had lost a limb I never really experienced phantom pain and the doctors couldn’t understand why. Rather than take my discharge on the East Coast I had elected to
