Published in The Examined Life, Fall, 2025.
Bruce and I stand on a small makeshift pier that sits just barely above the shallow water’s edge. We’re at Blue Springs in the Florida panhandle. Bruce, five years old and wearing overalls and cowboy boots, is reaching for my hand. I, his three-year-old sister, am holding on to his pants leg for security as I extend my lace-up boot to touch my reflection in the water. Below his thick, dark hair, my big brother’s expression is a mixture of caution and protectiveness, somehow caught up in a sweet smile. We were children then, with two lifetimes of testing, shaping experiences ahead. And while the essence of my brother’s nature that smile revealed didn’t change, I know that over the years the depth of it did.
About a decade and a half after that photo, Bruce wore, not his Blue Springs cowboy boots and overalls, but the combat boots and fatigues of a Marine in Viet Nam. Deeply committed to serving his country in that war, he had argued his way in with military doctors, despite a knee injury serious enough to result in a medical discharge.
I learned this along with the rest of our family, from a letter Bruce’s commanding officer, First Lieutenant James Kirschke, wrote to our father. My brother later told me that Kirschke was the kind of commanding officer who believed not only in the importance of letting his men’s families know when they were wounded or worse, but also when they did something above and beyond. In that same letter, he told of how, during one operation, Bruce became ill from drinking bad water and he ordered him to report to the medical unit. Not wanting to leave Lieutenant Kirschke alone, Bruce reluctantly left only to shortly return saying he was okay. Kirschke wrote, “Between you and [me], I seriously doubt he turned himself in in the first place.” The Lieutenant summed up his estimation of my brother by saying, “As our 81st platoon communications chief, he has done an outstanding job. As a Marine in combat, he has proven himself time and again to be very courageous.”
I remember how my breathing deepened and my rib cage expanded as I read those words. How well I knew my brother defended what he cared about, that defense taking multiple forms, both verbal and physical. As kids, Bruce wasn’t much different from other older siblings. I remember his delight in taunting me with various creepy crawly things. But I also vividly recall how he watched out for me on the playground, stepping in when someone tried to bully or make fun of me. During our late teens, he took me on camping trips. High in the Colorado Rockies, he taught me how to stay safe by shifting my weight for balance as we hiked over steep slopes with patches of loose rock, showed me which sticks and branches to use to build campfires, and how to fish in the mountain streams. He always made sure I got the warmest sleeping bag, and each morning I woke to a steaming cup of hot chocolate.
When our father died in late 1966, Bruce returned from Viet Nam, a few months before his tour of duty ended. The death, which had come suddenly, shocked us all. And I believe returning to an increasingly clamorous anti-war movement brought Bruce another significant jolt. Signs demanding “End the War,” and “Bring our G.I.s Back” were often accompanied by growing enmity toward those who fought in it. I believe Bruce took those signs and protests personally and, knowing him as I did, I wondered how he could not. For me, those days were tough. Though my respect ran deep for him and others who also served honorably, as the war went on, through news reports as well as personal letters, I learned of bombs dropped recklessly and of civilians killed with abandon— further fueling domestic discord at home. It was a tough time for everyone.
It’s true that Bruce and I came to see the world differently, in large part because our experiences were so different. He had gone to war. I had gone to university and married. While I can’t know the specific, felt impact of my brother’s experiences, so different from my own, from time to time through the years I’ve had glimpses of their consequences. Once, during a visit many decades after that long-ago day at Blue Springs and that far-away war he fought in, I was awakened in the night by Bruce’s yelling and screaming, “No! No! Get back!” I hurried down the dark hall to his room to find him propped up in bed, his barrel chest so like our father’s. In a voice groggy with sleep, he looked up at me and said, “It’s just a nightmare. I’ve had them for fifty-some years.”
After our father’s funeral back in ‘66, Bruce completed his military obligation at Camp Pendleton, California. Trading his combat boots for hiking boots, he returned to Colorado and attended gun-smithing school. In those days, he often took me out to practice with the derringer he’d given me, a German replica of a Remington Model 41, telling me he wanted to make sure I could protect myself. Although I couldn’t imagine needing a gun for protection, I did practice because I knew of his partiality for guns, hunting and target shooting. But more than that, I wanted to share at least a small part with my brother of what he so valued.
It was a year or so after Bruce’s service ended and during his time in gunsmith school, when my Marine jet pilot husband Ron deployed to Viet Nam. Not long after Ron left, I moved from California, where we’d been stationed, back to Colorado. Bruce came by often, and with his goofy jokes and propensity for spontaneous excursions—hikes, meals out, and visits to mutual friends, he helped keep my lonely spirits up. One night when we went to a Denver jazz club to hear our high school friend play with his Dixieland band, I was called home to learn that my husband’s plane had been shot down, killing Ron instantly. In the weeks and months after, I floundered, cried and cast about, desperate to find some sense of solid footing. Bruce was there through it all, giving me space when I wanted it, and being at hand when needed.
Bruce remained restless, though, troubled by the protests and the political decisions that fostered them, and I came to wonder if he’d begun to doubt the political forces that had sent him and others to Viet Nam. I remember when, perhaps stemming from a complicated mix of feelings that he’d been betrayed, combined with his sense of loyalty and his own stubbornness, he told me he would gladly return to that war. I was beyond relieved when he did not.
Instead, he kept his hiking boots and over the next few years completed his schooling, worked as a hunting guide, married and moved to Alaska’s interior. He and his wife were among the last to get an Alaskan homestead, one-hundred-sixty acres one-hundred-fifty miles southwest of Fairbanks, accessible only by bush plane. Up there, with few people to deal with and scant communication with the outside, they lived on the food they grew, hunted and fished for. Bruce also ran a trap line, often camping in thirty-below-zero temperatures when making the rounds of the line. I believe the demands of that life nurtured him, requiring him to be present to survive. And in the doing, he thrived.
Through the years, Bruce has never talked much about his experiences in Viet Nam. Recently, though, he came across a book titled Not Going Home Alone, A Marine’s Story, authored by James J. Kirschke. That Kirschke. Reading it he was surprised to find not only his name multiple times, but also what had happened to Lieutenant Kirschke after his transfer from the 81st to command another unit. Bruce knew the Lieutenant had been wounded, but he had had no idea how close to death he’d come. The mine explosion that nearly took his former commanding officer’s life, he learned, had taken both of his legs. When I asked Bruce about whether he’d known the extent of Kirschke’s wounds before reading the book, he told me, “No. But I’ve seen that happen to others.”
I read much of Not Going Home Alone, too, because I wanted to know more of what Bruce had experienced. And what I came away with was a much less abstract sense of war in all its horrors. I know how the war affected me, how my profound grief in Ron’s death then and over time caused a shaping and reshaping of myself as a search for the core of my being, a meaningful way to live in this world. And I caught a glimmer of the nightmare Bruce’s time in war had lodged in him. But I had not known of the physical agony of a body blown up, yet still clinging to life, nor the courage it takes to live through that, to become functional and to find purpose in a much-changed existence.
In that early photo of the two of us at Blue Springs, the water is clear and still, only a few ripples disturb our reflections. Looking at it now, I sense a peaceful silence and camaraderie between my brother and me, that we’re in this together, this life, this world, this job of growing up. Obviously, he was looking out for his younger sister. Now, as I think back on the night of Bruce’s nightmare, I try to recall if before that I’d ever heard him scream or express fear, and I realize I had not. A chill creeps down my spine as I think again of war, of Ron, of Lt. Kirschke, and, yes, of my brother’s protectiveness, his sweet smile. And I can’t help but ask, who protects the protectors?
Notes:
Kirschke, James J., Not Going Home Alone, A Marine’s Story. New York: Random House, 2001.
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