By Don Bradley
Jim Dougan, 76 of Grandview, got on a plane at 4 a.m. the other day with a bunch of other veterans for a Heartland Honor Flight to Washington, D.C.
The group, 90 vets and 90 companions, had a big time visiting the memorials and were supposed to head home that evening, but ended up spending the night because of plane trouble.
Worked out.
“They put us up in a fancy hotel,” Jim said with a nod. “Treated us real good. Wonderful time, great people.”
Wearing bib overalls and a Marine Veteran cap, Jim talked about the trip at a back table in Jess and Jim’s Steak House in Martin City. It was middle of the afternoon, the back room nearly empty.
Jim is not in the best of health, so it was time to do the Honor Flight if he was ever going to. And there was his buddy who didn’t come back from Vietnam. Jim wanted to see
Gene’s name carved on that wall.
He found it. Got the rubbing.
As Jim told stories about his friend and their time together over there, he began to lift and plunge his straw into his iced tea.
Again. Again. And again. Rhythmic. A pulse to a dark memory.
His wife, Ellen, leaned close.
“Stop that,” she said softly.
He hadn’t noticed he was doing anything, but knew if she said it, he probably was. They’ve been married 54 years. She’s always pulled him back.
He smiled and nodded.
In 1966, Jim was 18, fresh out of Grandview High School and working a boring factory job when he told his boss he needed the afternoon off to go join the military.
Older guys nearby, some of them veterans of earlier wars, laughed. But Jim went out and checked all the branches and turned out the Marines could take him quickest: next week.
He went home and packed a bag.
“And made his mom cry,” Ellen said.
He soon boarded a train for California and a few months later he was in Vietnam. A combat engineer, or as Jim puts a technical spin on it: “We built stuff and we blew stuff up.”
Heartland Honor Flight, remembers his
friend who died in Vietnam
His buddy got killed. Other friends died. Jim got hit by mortar fire during Tet. After a long hospital recovery in Guam, he wanted to go back to the fighting for what he called–without elaboration– “unfinished business.”
Finally in 1969, Jim came home.
At the time, Ellen was in nursing school with Jim’s sister and one day she gave the sister a ride home.
“We came in and found Jim on the floor, on his stomach, watching The Three Stooges,” Ellen said. “That’s how we met.”
Jim and Ellen got married in 1970. Three kids, 11 grandchildren, 4 great-grandchildren.
Jim worked as a mechanic and a crane operator. He lived his life, raised a family and never talked much about Vietnam.
But there was always something from back then, brought back at random times by the slightest dab. A sound, a smell, the feeling of air.
He says Ellen got him through those things and she’s the one who pushed the Honor Flight.
She told him: “This is something you need to do.”
Twice a year, the all-volunteer, not-for-profit Heartland Honor Flight loads a chartered jet with veterans and takes them to Washington for a day of honor to visit the memorials.
Some say they return with a new sense of peace.
Jim wasn’t expecting a miracle. He did say being at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with others like him, was “satisfying.”
Back home, plans for the big welcoming back to KCI sunk when the veterans’ flight got delayed. Ellen worried the large crowd wouldn’t come back the next morning.
They did. Family, friends, kids and grandkids. Cheering, holding signs and waving flags. They lined both sides of a concourse and the vets came down the middle.
Ellen saw her husband smile.
“This was the welcome they should have gotten back then,” she said.
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