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INTRODUCTION
This
brave and beautiful book affirms something I have long believed:
the flag on the coffin covers only the obvious tragedy.
Every
bullet, bomb, land mine, mortar round or grenade that killed an
American soldier in Vietnam stopped other lives here dead in their
tracks.
The
life Glenda Carter thought she was going to lead and the future
she thought she was going to live ended, exactly three months
after she was married, on September 14, 1968 when, as she puts
it, “the Vietnam war came to my doorstep,” with the
unbearable news that it would take her 36 years to heal; her husband,
Bruce Carter, was dead, killed by a bullet to his head on September
11, 1968.
Glenda
Carter had never seen her Marine husband in his dress blues until
she looked at him in his coffin. There was no face to see for
the last time, no cold cheek to kiss. His head was swaddled in
bandages. For decades her soul would be bound and hidden away
from a world that truth be told—cared very little for women
like Glenda.
Go
on, get over it, you’ll be married again one day said the
man who tried to talk Glenda out of buying a burial plot next
to her husband. His crude, blunt honesty is why so many never
heal. Grief is dismissed, diminished and discounted in our culture
as if it’s just something to “get over” like a
small step or a high curb.
For
years, Glenda Carter felt as though she was “on a raft, drifting
around a cesspool.”
Her
husband was dead. But her love for him was not. “When you
died, I lost not only you, I lost me,” and her heart was
held hostage for years and years and years.
She
was, for a time, able to put on a happy-go-lucky face. She got
degrees and held jobs. She became a passionate photographer.
And
then she came undone. There was depression, despair and suicide
attempts. When people asked what she did for a living, she wanted
to say, “I spend my time doing what it takes to survive.”
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