An old soldier looks back with pride and anguish

MORGANTOWN, W.VA. — He lives with his wife in a trailer east of town, beside a heavily traveled two-lane highway that carries families of fallen soldiers to the national military cemeteries in Grafton. It was a perfect spot, David Stevens decided, to build a monument to American soldiers -- the sort of expression of gratitude he might have appreciated 40 years ago when he came home from Vietnam.

“They called me a baby killer back then,” recalled the 61-year-old combat veteran, who served two tours with the Army’s 1st Infantry Division. “I got in a lot of fistfights over that.”

And so, just before last Memorial Day, Stevens nailed a sign to a maple tree that listed every war from World War II to Iraq and implored passersby to “Support Our Troops.” Around the tree he arranged flags, a military headstone, combat boots and, evocative of a battlefield grave, a helmet resting on a rifle planted barrel-first in the Appalachia soil.

“It’s a work in progress,” Stevens said of the monument, which now has a new, professionally painted sign. “I’ve got me a big game plan. I want to get some mannequins and dress them up as soldiers, as guards. I want to get some electric lights on it at night. You come back next Memorial Day, bud, and this will be something to see.”

In our view, it already was. We had been headed to Grafton, a town with a rich military tradition, seeking a counterpoint to an earlier stop at an Indiana peace demonstration. Stevens’ roadside shrine practically jumped out at us.

A knock brought to the door a man with long white hair, a mustache and pale blue eyes. Stevens invited us into the trailer’s front room. Flames were flickering in the gas fireplace and Whoopi Goldberg was holding forth on TV. Stevens settled into the soft chair, covered with a military flag, where he retreats most every night after the battle dreams return.

The walls were covered with photographs. Stevens pointed to one of a World War II sailor blazing away from the deck with an antiaircraft gun.

“That’s my father,” he said, “trying to shoot down kamikazes in the Pacific.”

He listed many, many relatives who served in the military. That’s just the way it is, he said, in the hills of West Virginia. With his father’s permission, he enlisted in the Army at the age of 17 and soon found himself in Vietnam, a foot soldier in the Big Red One.

Stevens handed us another picture. It was him as a young man, standing in a jungle clearing with an M60 clutched in his hands. His shirt was off, and draped around his browned chest were two cartridge belts.

“See how young he was,” said Cheryl Stevens, his wife of 20 years who had joined us.

“I worked my way up to buck sergeant by the time I was 19,” Stevens said. “It was hard because I looked so young. They called me the baby-faced sergeant. I wanted to make a career of it in the military, but Vietnam did me in.”

He evidently was a proficient soldier. Hanging on the wall was a display case filled with medals and campaign ribbons. Cheryl said it had been difficult persuading him to display his hardware.

With no hint of embellishment, he mentioned piles of enemy bodies draped across perimeter wires, and a buddy’s death scream from a burning vehicle, and the ferocity of fire that came with the job of directing helicopters down to landing zones. His counselor at the Veterans Center could verify his record, Stevens said, and he showed us his combat infantry badge and a letter of appreciation he’d received recently from the Army.

The pained expression in his pale eyes, though, provided a more powerful form of documentation of what he went through 40 years ago. It’s not only what Stevens saw in Vietnam that haunts him; it’s that he can’t stop seeing it. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, Stevens said he is on full disability now and has received counseling for the last 10 years.

“It’s helped,” he said, “but I still can’t sleep: Three or for hours a night at most, and usually I end up out here on the chair.”

For a long time he tried to grit it out, working factory jobs, tending bar, keeping his Vietnam memories bottled up as best he could. If anyone asked him what happened over there, he had a one-word reply to kill the conversation: “Nothing.”

Lately, though, he’s been able to open up more and more. And attitudes have changed from when the baby-faced sergeant returned home to be vilified as a baby killer. If nothing else, it seems as though since Vietnam, Americans have learned to make distinctions between those who initiate wars and those who actually fight them.

“The home attitude,” Stevens said, “is a lot better than what I went through.”

And what did he think about the Iraq war?

“I think it is going to go fine,” the old soldier said, “as long as we take out what we have to take out, as long as we get it done. . . . I’d like to see us win this one. I’d like to see them come home to a big parade. You know what gets to me? In Vietnam, we won every battle, every battle, but we lost the war. And it still hurts, man.

“It still hurts.”

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