Written : June 2000

Today is your birthday (June 20)…all that I want to is to sit in here at my deck, and sort through this box of pictures, and letters, till the day is gone, maybe wear one of your t-shirts and drink a Coors-lite in your honor.

As long as there is a breath in this human body, there will always be “question marks” regarding some of the chapters in the Grand book of Life. I KNOW that I will not understand on this side of Heaven why things happen as they do.  The good stuff and the bad things. It’s strange how something incredible can happen to us, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime thing; we accept it and move forward to the next station of our lives, rarely revisiting that good fortune. We live in it, and we may be all the better for it happening, but we continue walking the path of the daily grind and don’t give it much thought.

Alas, this cannot be said about a rough time, a sad time, one of those moments that broke our hearts in two. Those moments live inside of us daily. They never go away, and only time eases the intensity of the pain or the brokenness, but it never removes it. IT’S THE CIRCLE OF LIFE.  We learn from the tough times, and appreciate the good times…What doesn’t kill us makes us more alive.

Larry is my cousin.  He was born 13 years before me.  On June 20, 1949.  By the time that I was 5 years old … Larry had been drafted into the Vietnam War.  By the time I was 15…I saw him once or twice at his parents’ house, which was just west of my parents’ home.

Most of the time, we, the younger brood of cousins, kept our distance from him. His family quickly discovered, upon his arrival home after serving three years in NAM, that Larry was in a fragile state of mind.  If you started a vacuum sweeper without warning him, or a loud truck drove by, he would DIVE under a coffee table or chair and start yelling for his comrades to take cover. Larry would not speak of the horrors that He saw over there, and normally, he wore a beautiful smile, and no one would have guessed the damage within his mind.

When I was 16, He had a wedding and was married. A little boy was born of that union.  Then another marriage to a wonderful gal, two little boys were born from that union.  And I believe there were 2 other marriages after those two.  Eventually, Larry moved out west to Nevada and bought a mountain. His own mountain and he was proud of it. It had no electricity and no running water, but he LOVED it.  He used generators for power, and He carried a 300-gallon tank in the back of his black Ford Ranger pickup. Once a week, after work, he would fill up in town at his brother’s home and drive it out to his mountain to offload it. He used a gravity feed system to supply his RV park model trailer with water for showering and such. He also had a poly take on the roof of his little cabin, to heat the water for showers. He was inventive.

I saw him in 1989. He flew home for the funeral of his sister-in-law.  We spoke a few words to one another but nothing long or meaningful.  In the summer of 2000, through another cousin, I was given his email address.  I touched base with Larry then and we began to visit via the net regularly. Larry invited us to come out and see his Mountain, see where he worked and how he lived. His mountain he said, 4 miles off the road, and clear around to the top.  By March of 2002, I was making plans to visit Nevada with my 18-year-old son.

On June 17, 2002, we landed in Reno, Nevada.  From the moment we saw one another, Larry and I instantly became “like twins”.  We were so similar in our actions, thoughts, and feelings. We used to joke and say, ‘Isn’t it funny how much alike we are? Do you think it’s our spirits meshing or just the fact that we have the same DNA?’ We would be talking about our childhood memories and suddenly reminiscing about the same room at Grandma’s house, or the red hip-roof barn that we were not supposed to go into, or all of Grandpa George’s rose bushes in the garden, which we were not allowed to disturb. Then, suddenly, we would laugh at the fact that we were both talking about the same grandparents, the same home, but our memories were 13 years apart. He could remember a younger and more vivid Grandma than I could.  He had a small Golden Book about the Lone Ranger sitting on his bookcase. He said, my Grandma gave me that for Christmas when I was four. It was signed to Larry, Merry Christmas 1953. Then he would laugh and say….well OUR grandma.

While we were there, we visited many of the area sights. Silver Springs, Fallon, The Ponderosa and BEAUTIFUL, HISTORICAL Virginia City.  Where we walked on old, weathered, boarded sidewalks. I loved the sound of boots walking across it, and just about every man out there wore spurs that jingled when he walked. I was mesmerized by the sound. My Son spent a lot of time missing his girlfriend, and that cell phone bill when we got home is something we laugh about today, but didn’t find it funny in 2002. ($350.00 roaming charges. On a dis note, He married the girl and they have 5 beautiful children today. First a Son, and four girls followed close behind him.)

A few days after our arrival to Nevada, Larry’s celebrated his 54^rd birthday. One afternoon Larry told My son and I that there was a mountain he had still never climbed since he moved out west almost 20 years prior and he wanted to drive out there. So, the three of us did just that. Out west, it’s always dry and everyone has a cooler in the back of their truck or car. It will have water, beer, pop, tea, etc but no one travels without a cooler because it is hot and dry out there.

I remember that morning well, Larry packed the cooler, told Thom and I to each grab a gun belt off the lamp post, which always had several guns loaded and ready to strap one on.  In Nevada, everyone carries a gun wherever they go. Thom was all about this.  We stopped at a gas station on our way out of town with holsters on and guns loaded we walked into the gas station and picked up a few more drinks and snacks. It was just the oddest feeling to me to walk around armed….in public….lol. I am a dead aim with a 44. Loved it.

As we traveled closer and closer to the distant mountains and then began our climb around the outside perimeter, it was hair-raising to say the least. The roads were narrow at times and very nerve-racking to look over the edge, but we continued our pilgrimage up this unclaimed mountain that Larry had always wanted to conquer.  When we arrived…We got out to stretch our legs, and Larry let out a yell of celebration.  It was amazing, and beautiful, and you could literally see for miles and miles and miles. 

There was a large rock formation that would make a cool picture but there was a 3-foot-wide crack we had to jump to get to that rock. If we fell or lost our footing, it would have been an absolute death sentence. Ask me today why I ever made that jump, and I could not tell you. I wouldn’t allow my son to jump it, but I did. I was 40 years old…. should have known better but thought I had already had 40 good years, so why not. It wasn’t a smart move. Today, I realize how awful it would have been for Thom to have to find his way back to a town some 98 miles away and live with what he might have seen that could have happened. I will blame it on the elevation and lack of oxygen in my head.

On the way home from that celebration, Thom and Larry wanted to get a rattlesnake hide for Thom’s hat, so we all stopped on the Carson River and Larry and Thom hunted for rattlesnakes from the banks of the river. They poked holes in and around rocks. It was crazy to me….but the two of them were having a blast. (They never did find a snake that day, and Lord only knows how I would have taken it …if they had.)

Larry and I spent a lot of time drinking coffee in the early morning hours. We tried to catch up on one another’s lives, what we had done as kids, as adults, as parents. We talked about the family reunions at our Grandmothers house or Aunt Mary Helen’s home, and all annual Christmas Eve gatherings there.   He had more fun stories to tell about our family, again, because he was older.

One morning, while the two of us were drinking coffee, he started talking about Nam and told me several stories about the time he served there, and how much of it haunted him daily. As he told me some of those horrors, I was in shock. I couldn’t move. My body was frozen, as if a rattler was crawling across my boot.  I didn’t speak, I didn’t interrupt. I just tried to listen without an expression on my face. I could see it was hard for him to talk about it all, but for some reason, He was recalling it all and talking about it.  A little while later, Larry stood up and walked over to the kitchen sink. He was crying hard, struggling to catch his breath. He blew his nose a few times then turned to me and said…. “I have never told anyone those stories. I can’t believe they just came out like that…….  It’s so hard to talk about them, but it’s such a relief to let them out”.  I stood up out of my chair, and approached him slowly, then wrapped my arms around him and hugged him tight.

I understood after that why He asked God NEVER to give him a daughter if he had children. And GOD never did.  The images he carried in his mind haunted him daily, all that killing, the horrible things that he had witnessed. Among the stories………He and 5 of his comrades were sleeping in a tent; there wasn’t enough room for all of them on cots, so Larry said he would sleep underneath one of them in his sleeping bag. When he woke up the next morning, all 5 of the men sleeping above him had been killed with complete silence. Man after man, he had to find them, and radio for help to get them lifted out, or picked up, all the while wondering if the Vietcong had moved on or were waiting a few hundred yards away.    

He turned to drinking to dull the pain and bury the memories, but he told me that once his body hit its limit, he would pass out, no matter where he was, but he could never DRINK AWAY the memories, and that they never gave him any peace. When he came too late, they were still there haunting him.

It did not help that upon arrival home, these men were greeted with less than a hero’s welcome.  He said as they boarded planes for home, they were all excited, but once they landed on American soil, they could see civilians gathered waving signs that called them baby killers and murderers. They had invectives hurled at them, and people spat on them. Finding a job was more than difficult; if you could try to function normally again, people would see you were a Vietnam vet, and they would be met with a veil of disgust and discrimination.

The VIETNAM War lasted longer than any other war before.  From 1964 to 1973, it claimed 58,000 American servicemen and wounded over 150,000. Men came HOME…they returned HOME, but it wasn’t the warm, welcoming HOME they remembered. They were broken, bleeding, and wounds that weren’t visible with the human eye, and they were told to go home, with no psychological evaluation or help.

 GOD, AMERICA DROPPED THE BALL during that time. WE WERE ILL-PREPARED TO GIVE THESE SERVICE MEN ALL THAT THEY DESERVED. They didn’t need a parade; they just needed our love and support, a universal embrace for all they had endured. They didn’t ask to go over there, they didn’t get to vote on it, they were drafted and shipped out to the very PITS OF HELL!!!

The rest of the day, we continued exploring, and now and then he would shake his head and say, “I can’t believe I told you all that stuff about Nam this morning.” I soaked it all up, and still today, I feel that God placed me there, at that time, in that moment, so Larry could release and heal from a few of his scars …move forward.  And He did. From then on, when he would call me, He would tell me little things like…”I haven’t dreamed of Nam in months, or he would say I stopped seeing the horror movie in my mind. He felt a sense of relief, and he was grateful for it. And I was thankful to be there for him.

GOD did give Larry a Granddaughter.  And one day while we three were in town Larry wanted to stop by and show her to us. He stepped inside that door and yelled, “Haylie Marie, come see your Papa,” and just like that, a little 4-year-old girl with long brown pig tails wearing only her panties and a little t-shirt came running down the hall and leaped into her Papa’s arms. It brought tears to my eyes just watching him with her. She has no idea, the healing she brought with her when she was born.

 Larry saw many beautiful, young Vietnamese children who the Vietcong strapped and concealed bombs to their small bodies and made them walk into the American soldier camps. These poor children had no idea what was happening or what they were being used for. The first few were met with love and awe, as the bombs then exploded, killing or wounding the American soldiers who stepped forward believing the child was lost or needed help. After that, a child who wandered into their camp HAD to be considered an enemy and ……..well, imagine being that soldier who has been commanded to take them out. HORRIFIC.  

Larry and I became the best of friends. There was no subject we couldn’t talk about….and we loved many of the same things in life.  We left that weekend to return to Michigan…and it was an emotional, sad goodbye for me. It felt like I had just found a long-lost brother, and now I had to leave him. Was it our similar DNA, or was it the fact that he had shared the darkest, haunting secrets of his soul with me, and now I felt connected to him? I carried the weight of his confession for a long time.

Three months later, Larry invited me back out for a 3-day gun show in Reno. I had inadvertently scheduled the flight out of Kalamazoo to Reno for September 1^st …the anniversary of the 9-11 attack. I was scared to fly, scared to leave my little farm, and yet I hated to miss the opportunity. I, a person who had never flown, never gone anywhere except to have a baby at a hospital, was now going to fly for a second time. Alone. (An incredible story about my fellow flying passengers, I will save for another time.)

 We attended a 3-day gun show in Reno, where I met Neil Armstrong. We fished on the banks of Topaz Lake, using a brown paper bag as a makeshift cutting board while eating cheese, bologna, and crackers. We also drank Coors Light off the tailgate of his Black Ford Ranger.  He pulled his dog tags from his tackle box later that day and said, ‘Back during the VIETNAM war, you were only issued one pair of dog tags, and I had kept them all these years, but now he wanted to leave them with someone who would care about having them.’  

Sweetest coincidence. I have my dad’s army tags, my uncle Fred’s army tags, Burt’s army tags, and now Larry’s. How I became THE KEEPER OF THE TAGS, I am not quite sure, but I treasure them all just the same. I hang them on the Christmas tree every year, and then they go back into the lock-fireproof box and leave me wondering, who will care about them when I am gone?

Here we were at the HAAS center, and there were several signs. After I got home, I noticed a sign that said ‘Wayne’s Gun.’ Larry’s dad (my dad’s oldest brother) was an avid gun collector and had been selling, trading, and repairing guns his entire life.

This is Larry fishing in Lake Topaz. Here is where he passed on his dog tags to me. What a great day fishing we had. I fished from the shore. He walked out clear up to his belt, and at one point ask me to bring him a beer. I rolled up my jeans to my knees, waded out only that far and yelled “Haas, if you want this beer you are going to have to walk this way, because I don’t aim to soak myself and wear wet clothes the rest of the day” His brother and sister-in-law just roared with laughter. He met me but filled both his front pockets with cans of beer.   

After I came home, He and I talked via emails every day, and about once a week or so by phone. Larry was the plant manager for Northern Kenworth where they made Allison Transmissions. For a short 15 months Larry and I shared a beautiful, powerful, deep friendship and then late one night on November 14, 2003, Larry was killed in an accident. In that same black truck, we had explored the countryside in, and had picnic lunches on.  He was turning into his driveway off the main road, and turned in front of a young man going 90 miles an hour in a silver Jag. Both drivers were killed instantly. It is believed that Larry, saw nothing…that he began to turn into his driveway in the same way he did everything, slowly and methodically and this young man flying at 90 m.p.h. was on top of him before he knew.  Investigators said that even if Larry did look before he began to make his turn, the kid would have been on top of him that fast. . …And just like that Larry was gone.

I felt like someone had just crushed my chest and all breath was gone. It was impossible to believe. I could not wrap my mind around the fact that He and I would never talk again, I would never hear him say my name again, or hear his laughter.

I had agreed earlier that week, to take my daughter and her boyfriend (now hubby with four beautiful children) hunting for the first time on Opening Day of deer season. I went forward, I smiled my way through it, and once we were back in my woods, and I knew that I was alone, I sat with my back against a large oak tree and cried and cried and cried. The blow was so hard to take. If the biggest, most beautiful buck had walked right up to me, I couldn’t have lifted my gun to shoot it. I was devastated.

I flew out to Nevada one last time for his funeral. My Dad and Uncle Fred also flew out with me. Nothing…..,NOTHING ,,,,,,prepared me for seeing him lying in a coffin.  I stared at him, till it hurt too bad to breath and took the nearest exit out of that little white church. It was hot and dry outside and his sister was standing to my left smoking a cigarette. It was the first and only time in my life that I wished I smoked. Can’t even explain why, perhaps it was because I subconsciously remembered at that moment that he was a smoker too.

In the hot, Nevada desert sun, we attended his memorial service.  Through a flood of my own tears, I had to laugh and whisper   “OH Larry, you would get such a charge out of seeing all these women here crying over you”…and the men in wranglers and Stetsons never stopped walking up to the graveside. It was an awesome sight. Couldn’t help but wonder if this was the same scene that we would have viewed at the funeral for Wyatt Erp or Tom Mix.  It was that real, that authentic, that true blue western saga. The stuff that legends are made of and books are written about.

Larry died at 54. He was much too young to leave this world.  Much too young.

LIFE IS SO FLEETING, SO SHORT. ACCEPT THE LOVE THAT IS OFFERED,

 GIVE LOVE IN RETURN AND REMEMBER to

ENJOY THIS DAY TO THE FULLEST…..BECAUSE TOMORROW MAY NOT BELONG TO YOU.  

 

FIFTEEN months wasn’t long enough, why did it have to happen, why did God created it so that we would be so close just BEFORE he passed.  I don’t know. I do know I miss him, I miss his smile, his laughter, the sound of his voice when I would call and he would answer “Hello this is Larry”.  He LOVED my soaps and kept himself and half his workers at ALLISON’S TRANSMISSIONS stocked up with it.  He heard me when I spoke, there was nothing too silly or ridiculous, or unimportant to him…He wanted to hear anything and everything I had to say, and it was that way for me when he would talked. The beauty of the memories, the strength of the bond will live on.

Whenever we walked down the street in Virginia City, He would never say a word but would just step behind me and end up on the “Street Side” of me, saying ” Out here, woman don’t walk on the curb side of the road, same with planes. No matter what the ticket says…. the women always give a man the aisle seat.”.

Larry Served His country proud in Nam, and he truly is one of the last REAL COWBOYS that I had the PLEASURE and BLESSING of getting to know. He fit the bill of everything a cowboy was.

Today He would have been 67.

HAPPY HEAVENLY BIRTHDAY MY DEAR COUSIN. I love you always…look forward to having another cup of coffee with you one day. Save me a seat, and get a large table. I am sure that our friend Burt and your Dad, our uncles, aunts, and other family members will be joining us for a great visit together

Larry Karl Haas   June 20, 1949 – November 14, 2003

Garth Brooks sang it best:

“And now, I’m glad I didn’t know, the way it all would end, the way it all would go.

Our lives are better left to chance, I could have missed the pain, But I’d have had to miss the dance.”

(I Wouldn’t have missed our time together Larry…not for all the world.  Lots of love and laughter, no regrets, no goodbyes, I will  see you on the other side.)