On March 22, 1968 in the Thua Thien province of Vietnam outside of Hue, a sniper’s bullet killed my uncle. His name was Jeffrey G. Hamilton. In the same small arms exchange, Jeff’s friend and fellow Ohioan, James Ackerman, was also killed. They were from different parts of Mansfield, Ohio; Jeff from the “good” side, Jimmy from the “bad” side, and by happenstance they ended up in the same platoon in which Jeff served as the 2nd Lt, and Jimmy his radioman. Their death, then, kind of makes sense, as Jeff was in a forward position getting ready to call out coordinates for some suppressing mortar rounds, when he was killed, and Jimmy was right there next to him, radio on his back.
Fast forward to spring of 20o9. My grandmother (my dad’s and Jeff’s mom), Elsa Cox Hamilton, passes away quietly at 96. My father and I drive to Mansfield to settle thing out. We pack up a van full of family effects; paintings of great great grandparents, deeds, things of that nature. As they are wont to do, the boxes of stuff remain mostly unopened and certainly ill-considered for many months.
Fast forward to the fall of 2009. I’m visiting the farm where I grew up, getting in a few more days of swimming before the weather turns. My dad pulls me aside and hands me a stack of papers in a strange, leather envelope. “I don’t know what to make of this,” he tells me, on the verge of tears. I look inside the envelop. It’s a manuscript of an unpublished book. The title is Jeff and Jimmy: A Vietnam Story.
The “story” is about how Jeff met Jimmy in Vietnam after they had lived only a handful of miles apart from each other for 18 or so years. How they became fast friends. How they coped with the hardships of the war together. And eventually how they died together. It features letters they sent to their respective families. The letters reference each other, as well as skirmishes in which they both fight. There is no listed author of Jeff and Jimmy, but there is a bizarre editing note on page 43 that refers to “Bateman.” Who is Bateman? What would s/he write a story about my dead uncle Jeff?
The site above is from 2010. It’s a sort of repository where I kept track of some of the research my dad and I did as we both tried to make sense of Jeff and Jimmy: A Vietnam Story. It includes letters/emails that I exchanged with differen vets that had served with both Jeff and Jimmy, as well as some vets who had dedicated themselves to preserving pictures and other such memories of Jeff and Jimmy’s air cavalry company and division. It also includes a handful (7) entries in a blog that I planned on keeping as my dad and I struggled to figure out who Bateman was. The blog was short lived, mostly because we found out Bateman’s identity pretty quickly. He was a friend of Jimmy’s sister, Kay Ackerman. Over beers one night, Kay was telling him the story of Jeff and Jimmy, and Buddy (Bateman’s preferred name) said something to effect of “this is a great story! You need to tell this story!” Kay didn’t have the energy or enthusiasm to do so, but she encouraged Buddy to give it a go. Jeff and Jimmy was a sort of cathartic experience for Buddy, himself a veteran of the Vietnam era (he served in Germany). He had lived for many years with a strong sense of survivor’s guilt, not only because he survived the war, but also because he never saw “action,” and he didn’t know many soldiers who were killed in action.
As a sort of postscript, building on the momentum that we generated with this little research project, my dad wrote a book, which is in the proofing stages at the moment. It’s called Jeff and Jimmy: A Vietnam Epistolary. It uses a lot of the letters and emails from vets, as well as exchanges between he and I, and his friends, and it tries to make sense of his brother’s death, I think, in a way that he’s never really tried to do in the forty some odd years it’s been since Jeff was killed.
