Thank you for your brother and the work he did in Vietnam. I’m sorry to hear he died so young from the heart attack. Did he have ischemic heart disease? I’ve got it from Agent Orange, but medicine has progressed since your brother died. I’ve had a couple of heart attacks, bypasses and stents, but am getting along OK.
I worked tunnels on the Batangan Peninsula in I Corps. We were about 5 clicks from My Lai, but word about the massacre had not yet come out. I was with the 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines.
We mainly worked two complexes, each about 3,000 feet long, including side branches. We blew about 20,000 lbs of Composition B cratering charges to destroy these. No Singer sewing machines, but we did capture 41 VC.
One morning I crawled out of one entrance and saw spit-shined jungle boots, starched, creased jungle utilities, a white head of hair and “1, 2, 3...1,2,3” stars on each shoulder. It was Lt Gen Stillwell.
“You boys are doing a great job! I’ll see that you all get a Bronze Star and a promotion to sergeant!”
Naturally, that’s the last we heard of that. The Marines are not too quick to hand out promotions and definitely not Bronze Stars to enlisted men, unless there was a lot of shooting going on and maybe you were wounded. Our Company commander did write us up for the Navy Achievement Medal, with Combat V. That was probably appropriate for what we did. Mine caught up with me in 1973.
My brother was 48 when he had his first heart attack. He stopped smoking after that, and was put on a diuretic. I'm not sure if he'd actually been diagnosed with heart disease, or if he was taking other blood pressure/heart medications at the time. There was a question at the time, as to whether he had stopped taking one or more of his medications. After he died, my sister-in-law found empty bottles of medications in the cupboard that he hadn't bothered to refill. He worked for Kodak at their Elm Grove factory in Rochester, New York. The diuretic was causing him to have to go to the bathroom too many times, and the bathroom, according to my sister-in-law, was quite a ways away from his station, so we think he stopped taking it because of that. My brother was a hard-head like my father, and more than likely, thought he knew better than his doctors. His stubbornness is probably what killed him in the end.
I hope you can continue to live your life without having to undergo any more procedures. I had four abdominal surgeries between 2010-2015. It'll be a cold day in hell before I submit to any more of that.