redrock
While I was protesting the war, he was fighting it...
The True things always ambush me on the road and take me by surprise. I was not looking for a true thing in the state of New Jersey. Nothing has ever happened to me in New Jersey.
I had been interviewing my old teammate Al Kroboth in Roselle, N.J., quizzing him about the 1966-67 basketball team at The Citadel for a book I'm writing. At six feet, five inches and carrying 220 pounds, Al had been a forward-center who, for most of his senior year, had led the nation in field-goal percentage. After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded, but which lay between us and would not lie still.
"Al, you know I was a draft dodger and anti-war demonstrator."
"That's what I heard, Conroy," he said. "I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right."
"Tell me about Vietnam, Big Al," I said.
On his seventh mission as a navigator for Maj. Leonard Robertson's A-6 fighter-bomber, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload when they were hit by enemy fire.
Though Al has no memory of it, he punched out somewhere in the middle of the ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. He doesn't know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days, nor does he know what happened to Major Robertson. (His name is engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA bracelet Al wears.)
When Al awoke, he couldn't move. A Viet Cong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. Al's back and neck were broken, and he had shattered his left scapula. When he was well enough to get to his feet (he still can't recall how much time had passed), two armed Viet Cong led Al from the jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi.
The journey took two months. Al Kroboth walked barefoot through the most impassable terrain in Vietnam, usually in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained, and he slept in bomb craters. Infections began to erupt on his body, and his legs were covered with leeches.
At the time of Al's walk, I had a small role in organizing the only anti-war demonstration every held in Beaufort, S.C., the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station.
My group attracted about 150 to Beaufort's waterfront. At that moment my father, a Marine officer, was asleep in Vietnam.
In 1972, at the age of 27, I thought I was serving America's interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led to a ground war in Southeast Asia.
To be continued tomorrow....