The Slice: The things you can and can’t remember as Memorial Day approaches

I didn’t really know him.

In fact, I didn’t know him at all. He was maybe 19 and I was in grade school in the 1960s.

By no stretch of the imagination was he close to anyone in my family. He lived in our general neighborhood. You would see him washing his car in the driveway.

He was in a different social orbit, though. Might as well have been a hundred miles away.

But we knew when he left to go to Vietnam.

And we knew he didn’t come back.

I wish I could remember that young man’s name. When you visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., you can’t just look for “the dark-haired kid who had the blue Pontiac GTO.”

The names are not arranged that way.

The only real memory I have is him wearing a white T-shirt and standing by his car. For all I know, that’s something I reconstructed in my mind after learning that he had been killed in Southeast Asia.

He must have been a bit older than my big brother. But apparently a college deferment was not in the cards for him.

It was not all that unusual to know of someone like him back then. Of course, I fully recognize it’s nothing like losing someone close or, God forbid, a family member.

But everyone in that neighborhood could say, yes, they knew somebody. Like in neighborhoods all across the country.

There’s a Neil Young song that deals with a junkie discarding a baby. It is not about casualties of war. But I hear the lyrics sometimes when thinking about what some soldiers sacrificed.

There’s one more kid

that will never go to school

Never get to fall in love,

never get to be cool.

I hope that boy from our neighborhood got to experience at least some of that.

I went online and tried to look up his name (using the town in Ohio as a search reference). It seems wrong that I cannot remember it.

But none of the names that might be his name ring a bell. Maybe he was a legal resident of a nearby town where a divorced parent lived. Or something. Who knows?

No matter. He wasn’t some random fact to check. He was a young man with a blue GTO and most of his life ahead of him. Until it wasn’t.

Today’s Slice question: If you had to guess, how many cheeseburgers will you consume between now and Labor Day?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. I still can’t believe nobody has stolen my idea for Grizzly Beary ice cream.