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Charlie

The saddest Vietnam story I know took place before I got there. It started in my hometown of Jackson, a long time and distance from Vietnam. It started with a picture of two eight year olds standing by their bicycles. One was me and the other was Charlie Ryberg.  

Charlie was sometimes my best friend. I say sometimes, because Charlie was pretty strange, and I wasn’t sure all the time that I wanted him as my best friend. He would listen to classical music, rather than the new rage, rock and roll. He sometimes stayed in to practice piano, when his mother said he could come out. Charlie was smart. In fact, he may be the smartest person I’ve ever met. 

By eighth grade, he was about eight grades ahead of the rest of us, and his dad decided that Jackson and us pretty ordinary boys were probably holding Charlie back. For the rest of his schooling, Charlie was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the top prep schools in the country. From there he graduated with honors and entered Harvard as a sophomore. There, too, he achieved the highest of honors. 

Charlie went to officer candidate school. I've wondered sometimes if he wasn’t trying to show the hometown folks that he wasn’t so unpatriotic after all.

I didn’t see anything of Charlie during those college years. I did, however, read an editorial he wrote for the Jackson County Pilot, criticizing our involvement in the Vietnam War. The town thought poorly of Charlie for expressing such sentiments. 

I’ve never quite understood how or why it happened. Charlie went to officer candidate school. Perhaps he was like me, just trying to find a way to postpone Vietnam in the hope that it would end. But it didn’t. I’ve even wondered sometimes if Charlie wasn’t trying to show the hometown folks that he wasn’t so unpatriotic after all. 

 

A granite memorial in the fall. Text reads: Class of 1963, Charles Edward Ryberg.

War memorial, Exeter Academy.

Charlie was in Vietnam a very short time before he was killed in the field. He was standing next to another soldier holding a canister of ammunition. A piece of shrapnel hit the canister and it exploded, killing Charlie.

Of all the mistakes which were made in Vietnam, this one seems to me the greatest of all. I’ve never been able to understand how we could have let Charlie Ryberg get away from us. It’s like one of those accidents where you hear about a child getting caught in a piece of farm machinery. You say, “How could they have let him get that close to something that dangerous?” 

A young, stoic U.S. soldier in uniform.

Lt. Charles Ryberg. Photo courtesy of www.virtualwall.org.

I didn’t go to Charlie’s funeral. I’m ashamed of that now, but I wasn’t for a long time. I was facing Vietnam myself, and I don’t think I wanted to deal with what that might mean. I wish I had gone to the funeral. Perhaps something was there that would have filled the gap left by Charlie’s death. He was going to change the world. There is no doubt about it in my mind. He was going to write a great novel, or become a great senator, or create an important invention. And we let him get too close to the machinery and it chewed him up.  

Sometimes when I’m looking at family photos, I come across that one of Charlie and me by our new bikes. I think, “Ah, Charlie, I wish you’d have stayed around and done ninth grade with the rest of us.”

Biographical Details

Primary Location During Vietnam: Cu Chi, Vietnam Vietnam location marker

Story Subject: Memorial

Story Themes: Casualties, Death and Loss, Dissent, Enlisting, Funeral, Memorial, Reflection, Relationships, The Vietnam Memorial, The Vietnam Wall

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