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Vietnam - 25 Years Later: Not everyone could say goodbye
Wednesday, April 26, 2000 By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Pfc. Eddie Heasley never saw his little girl.
He was 19 when a land mine blew apart his tank and killed him in Quang Nam, South Vietnam. The fallout from that explosion on May 14, 1971, is still being felt today.
Heasley, of East Butler, left a 7-month-old daughter who was born after he had been shipped to Vietnam. Jennifer Heasley is 29 now, a young woman trying to make sense of a war that has baffled the country.
For her, Vietnam is not a chapter from history class, but a cruel government policy that changed her life before she could walk.
Jennifer, part of a computer savvy generation, found terse shreds of information about her father on the Internet. One site -- www.thevirtualwall.org -- told her where she could find his name on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. Better still, it gave her a chance to post a remembrance on the Web of the man she desperately wanted to know.
Jennifer's 300-word essay contains one passage that sums up America's continuing sorrow over Vietnam. Writing to her Dad, she said: "Do you know how angry I am that you left me, even though I know it's not your fault? Do you know the confusion and guilt I carried with me throughout my life? I thought that it was my fault, that I was bad, and that's why you left me."
After Eddie's death, his wife, Debra, remarried. Vietnam was not often discussed around the house. An episode from Jennifer's junior high school days did even more to bottle the topic.
"We had to do a paper in English about someone you would like to say goodbye to. I wrote about my Dad, and my teacher criticized me for it. She said I missed the point. I had always liked her until then."
In addition to his wife and infant daughter, Eddie left his parents and six brothers and sisters. From all those sources, Jennifer eventually began to develop a portrait of him.
Eddie Heasley was one of those rare teen-agers who said he wanted to go to Vietnam. Another possibility is that he saw service there as unavoidable.
He had dropped out of Butler High School as friends were looking for ways to stay out of the war.
Eddie, good with his hands, began working with his father, fixing cars and small engines. Then one day, in a matter-of-fact way, he said he thought it was time to leave the garage behind and become a soldier.
His mother, Louise Heasley, didn't like it, not one bit. She didn't understand the point of American involvement in Vietnam, and no politician she watched on television could make it any clearer to her.
But she stayed silent. Louise and her husband, James, a World War II veteran, never talked about Vietnam, but her hunch is that he dreaded Eddie's going as much as she did. James Heasley died two years ago.
Eddie's own last year on Earth was a blur. He got married in May 1970, his tour in Vietnam began in July and Jennifer was born in October. But there would be no chance to know her.
On May 17, 1971, a priest and two soldiers came knocking on Louise Heasley's door. They asked if they could come in. She hesitated, saying her young children were home with German measles. But the Army visitors said they'd had their inoculation shots, and what they had to tell her was important. She knew the worst before they said any more.
Eddie had been killed three days earlier. Three other U.S. soldiers died with him.
When Louise talks about her son, tears flow freely. He loved to hunt and fish and play ball. She wonders what he might have been if he had come home and gone back to school. She thinks about other grandchildren he might have given her.
Most of all, she struggles to understand what he was doing in Vietnam in the first place.
"I thought it was not a necessary war. I mean, they didn't even call it a war at the time. They sent all of our boys over there for what? What did they accomplish?"
Jennifer said the war has made her overly cautious. She is worried about getting too close to someone for fear that he will vanish.
She will turn 30 in the fall, but she is staying with her grandmother and has not started a family of her own. "She doesn't even have a boyfriend," Louise said.
Vietnam is part of the reason. In the remembrance to her father, Jennifer said what happened to him still affects her choices.
"Do you know that I want to get married, have children and live happily ever after? But the fear of losing someone terrifies me to death and keeps me from the happiness that I wish for."
She's trying to get on with life, but it's not easy.
"I don't want to see things as they really are," she said. "I want them to be how I want them to be."
Tomorrow: Vietnam copes with poverty without a grudge against America.
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