Johnny, I hardly knew ye....

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

Listening to Fogerty's "Deja Vu All Over Again" took my mind back to the Viet Nam War, and a friend I'd known since I was 4 years old. His name was Johnny, and he came from a poor family. We were neighbors, living in the same block of a large Midwestern city, our families renting rooms in the old houses along a busy commercial stret. We both moved around a lot, but kept bumping into each other-first at one school, then another. Neither of us fit in; I was fat, he "looked funny"-we were teased unmercifully on the playground. And maybe because of this, we stuck together--and I still have the metal pin he gave me in third grade, a sort of thank you for not teasing him and actually talking to him.

Time went on. I was able to get out of the poverty trap by using my brains; I was accepted at a laboratory high school (where I got along as well as I had in grade school, which meant I didn't), and lost touch with Johnny. I heard about him through friends at church who were in the choir with me--he was working at McDonald's. I graduated and went to college on scholarship. He graduated and joined the Navy and went to Viet Nam.

I remember the shock I had when one of my choir friends told me he had died--not in the jungles, but on a lonely stretch of road outside town. Don't know if he was high or drunk or whatever, but consensis seemed to be it wasn't just bad luck. I hadn't heard of PTSD back then, but looking back, I'd say it was a factor in his death, as he'd only been back home for a couple of weeks.

Deja Vu all over again--only worse now, I think. There are a lot of Johnnies out there who never really have had a chance at life--and now a lot of young women who might want to go to college but can't find the scholarship that was available to me. How many of them will die in Iraq, or how many of them will, like Johnny, die on a lonely road because they couldn't live with what they had seen?