Cal.E.'s Corner

d.: To follow up on yesterday's post, here is a chapter out of "The Inert Ingredient" entitled "The Casualties of War," along with the book'sdedication page

DEDICATION This book is dedicated to all the brave men and women who give up their time, freedom, and sometimes their lives so that the rest of us can be free to live a life filled with liberty and devoid of fear. d.c. scot Not all casualties of war are found on the battlefield. This thought occurred to Jedidiah Jones, as he considered why he had given up the banking industry for the nursing profession. He reflected on his former career and why he decided to leave it for a more difficult, if more rewarding career. Being a nurse offers the holders of that designation much satisfaction, as a rule. However, Jedidiah Jones wanted to influence other potential nurses to use their skills to not only help physicians heal patients, but to help soothe their often frazzled mental states as well. His purpose in asking his friend from his hometown to use the morgue at his precinct had been to demonstrate how nurses could help prevent unnecessary deaths. Jed had assumed, apparently in error, that the corpse he asked Jay about was from someone who had committed suicide in an unusual way. He was shocked and more than a little shaken by Jay’s answer to his question. Jed thought back to the chain of events that led him into the nursing profession. His mentor, his older brother, Jeff, had EVERYTHING to do with this decision… *************************************************************************** Jeff Jones had been an excellent athlete, which intensified Jed’s feeling that the young swimmer may be his biological niece, although he did not share her and his brother’s athleticism. Jeff was a starting forward on the high school basketball team as well as a pitcher on the baseball team. He did not participate in the sport that Texas is known for, football, because he had a mild heart condition and was plagued by “mild” asthma. Even these two conditions, though, were not enough to keep the young man from being drafted into the conflict on the other side of the world in the early nineteen-seventies. The army had plans for the young man. Jeff had a condition known as “hyperopia,” or farsightedness. What this meant was that he could see at a long distance what most people cannot see, even if his vision in proximity was not ideal. The Army officers, noting this, as well as his other two medical conditions, reasoned that Jeff Jones would be an excellent candidate to be a sniper, even if they must change the way the rifle would discharge its used cartridges so as not to interfere with the left-handed gunman’s vision. They reasoned incorrectly. While Jeff was an excellent athlete, he had no desire to participate in the sport of hunting as a teenager. His father had taken him on only one occasion. When Jeff let a trophy buck walk past him without even raising his rifle, Mr. Jones reasoned that his older son would not be a very good hunter. Mr. Jones was accurate in his thinking. He was thrilled, then, when his younger son took up the sport. Even though he was not anywhere near as good at team sports as his older sibling, Jed excelled at hunting. Jeff Jones had no desire to kill an animal that would supply him food. He certainly had no desire to kill another human being, much to the U.S. Army’s chagrin. Although he scored as an “expert marksman” on the firing range, Jeff declared that he would never use his skills to harm another person. He held true to this philosophy. Seeing no other choice, the Army made him a nurse’s aide at a M.A.S.H. unit. It was at this M.A.S.H. unit that Jeff Jones saw situations much worse than he had experienced on the battlefield. At least on the battlefield, Jeff reasoned, those soldiers who were left to die would be out of their misery in a short time. At his M.A.S.H. unit, soldiers were patched up enough (physically) to either be put back into action or sent home. Their mental states were never addressed properly. It may have been this assignment that sent Jeff Jones “over the edge” mentally. *************************************************************************** Jeff Jones had returned from the Vietnam Conflict, a situation in which he never wanted to be involved, to boos, hisses, and even people spitting on him because of his status as a veteran of the “lost war.” It may have been this, or the things that he saw while deployed that affected his mental state. His family was never sure. A combination of both was probably accurate. At any rate, the” ideal young man” returned a shell of his former self. *************************************************************************** When he was young, Jeff Jones was the son all mothers and fathers wished their offspring would emulate. At six feet, three inches on his sixteenth birthday, Jeff Jones could easily pass for someone at least three years his senior and procure hard liquor for himself and his friends. Nineteen was the legal age in Texas to buy hard liquor at that time. With thick, dark facial hair, a sixteen-year-old Jeff Jones could easily pass for a nineteen-year-old and buy hard liquor. This was especially true since most clerks were not apt to ask for an identification card if s/he believed that person in question to be of legal age. The owners and workers did not wish to insult, and thus lose, their scant clientele. Although Jeff Jones went through the usual rebellion that most teenage boys experience, sneaking a cigarette or a beer on occasion, he never was apt to try drugs or hard liquor in his teen years. Not until he returned from the Vietnam conflict, that is. *************************************************************************** When he returned to his hometown from his nightmare on the other side of the world, Jeff tried to ease his pain with hard liquor, then mild recreational drugs. The Jones couple tolerated his use of whiskey and pot for a time. When he turned to hard drugs, though, the couple decided to employ “tough love” to help their older son get his mental state in order. They threatened to kick him out of their house if he did not pursue education or procure a permanent job. So, when Jeff had been sober for six months, he enrolled in the local community college at his parents’ behest. He did not do as well as he had done in high school while taking the “weeder courses,” but he did not fail out of junior college, either. He had a high enough grade point average to enroll in senior college. That is when the former high school salutatorian retrogressed. As soon as he set foot on campus, the advisor that the school assigned Jeff Jones informed him that he must declare a major. Jeff had no idea what he wanted to do with his life at this point, so he relayed his concern to his advisor. The advisor then told him that he must declare a major to decide which classes to take. Jeff chose to declare “general studies” as his major. He used the G.I. bill to help pay for his degree, since his parents asked him to prove himself before they would help pay for his education. When he (barely) graduated, Jeff Jones discovered that industries were not eager to hire someone who graduated in “general studies” with a low grade-point average. After six months of searching for a permanent job, taking jobs as a sacker at a grocery store and a clerk at a convenience store in the interim, Jeff became so discouraged that he turned back to drugs to relieve his pain. This pain was intensified by the fact that not only was his status as a Vietnam War veteran not helpful in securing a job, but it was also often thought of as a deterrent. He disappeared from his family’s vista for six months. When Jeff Jones returned to his childhood home, he bought a bottle of bourbon and invited his younger brother to join him in the woods on the family’s small farm. There, he showed his younger sibling a three-page letter from a sixteen-year-old girl. She claimed to be pregnant with Jeff’s child. She declared, in that letter, that the sonogram indicated that she was pregnant with a girl. Jeff told his brother that the only two things the couple had in common were that they were both left-handed and enjoyed taking recreational drugs. Even though being involved in drug use was how the two had met, this was not something that Jeff wanted to base a relationship upon, he said. The young lady was asking for help in her letter, not a relationship. She declared that she did not believe in abortion, so she would not abort the child. She also wished to try to raise the child on her own, since her parents had abandoned her when she became pregnant by a man whom she declined to name. She did not wish to put the child up for adoption, either, even though her parents insisted on this before they would help her financially. She was just asking for emotional and financial support with the situation. These two things were things that Jeff Jones could not afford to give. He had little money and even less mental stability. Jed reasoned that a drug-addled sixteen-year-old with little or no money and no financial support would not be able to support herself and her child and care for the infant properly. He believed that Child Protective Services would eventually investigate the situation and place the child in foster care. That is why he wondered if the teenage swimmer was his niece. *************************************************************************** After the Jones boys read the letter, Jeff set fire to the paper and finished his fifth of bourbon. After stomping out the fire, he urged his brother to return to the farmhouse. Jeff Jones then disappeared. The next day, his lifeless body was found on an adjoining farm. The cause of death was determined to be the result of a self-inflicted .380 gunshot wound. The weapon, however, was never recovered. Jeff had wandered onto a farm where the Jones boys had been warned by their father never to go, even if the prey from their hunting died on that property. The Burns’ farm was off-limits, Mr. Jones had said. The Burns owned both a pool hall and the only liquor store in the county that adjoined it in addition to their farm. Even these three enterprises, however, would not be enough to afford the couple the expensive cars and jewelry that they tended to buy on an annual basis. There was suspicion that illegal activity was being conducted on the family farm. This was never investigated since the Burns had the local authorities in their “back pocket.” No investigation was deemed necessary of the death of Jeff Jones for this reason. The sheriff was sure that the suicide weapon eventually would be recovered. When it never was, he reasoned it had been taken by a wild animal into his or her den. However, the Jones family reasoned that whoever had killed the elder sibling of the family had done both him and his family a favor. They saw no reason to contradict the local sheriff’s hypothesis. Perhaps Jeff had reasoned that he could commit “suicide by trespassing.” His body was put to rest three days after his tormented soul was freed from its earthly existence. Jed missed his brother, but he was also glad that his sibling had been relieved of his unbearable mental hell. Still, he wondered about his niece. Jeff’s return from the war was so painful that the Jones couple told their younger son that, if he was ever drafted, he must flee to Canada to avoid serving in the military. They had no desire to lose both sons to wars that seemed to have no point to them. Fortunately, the United States was not involved in any type of military action when Jed Jones was obligated to register for the peacetime draft. This continued to be true past his twenty-fifth birthday, much to his and his parent's relief.