I didn’t know anything about Danny Halvorsen. I want to be honest about that. I’d heard the name. Everybody in Harmon had heard the name. There’s a little plaque at the VFW, and his name is on the memorial in front of the courthouse, the black granite one with the names of the county’s dead from every war.
Daniel G. Halvorsen. Vietnam. 1968.
I’d walked past it a hundred times.
I didn’t know the rest until that afternoon, when my mother finally told me, sitting at her kitchen table with the parade over and the red cardigan hanging on the back of her chair.
She told it slowly. Like she was reading it off a page she’d memorized a long time ago and never said out loud.
“I’d been in country four months,” she said. “The 71st was a big hospital. Quonset huts. Sandbags. The helicopters came in night and day. You’d hear them before you’d see them. The rotor sound. We’d all start moving before they landed.”
“February of sixty-eight. Tet. The whole country was on fire. We worked thirty-six hours, then slept for four, then worked another thirty-six. I don’t remember a lot of it. It runs together.”
She turned her coffee cup around on the table.
“He came in on a Tuesday. I remember because the chaplain had said Mass that morning and I’d missed it again. Chest wound. Abdomen. He’d been carrying another boy out under fire when he got hit. The surgeons worked on him four hours. They couldn’t fix it.”
“They moved him to the ward afterward. There wasn’t anything else to do. I was the nurse on the ward that night.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“He was nineteen,” she said. “He was from Harmon. I didn’t know that till I looked at his chart. I’d been in country four months and I’d never met anyone from home. Not a single soul. And here was this boy from Harmon, Minnesota, and he was dying.”
“He was awake for a while. Not long. He knew where he was. He asked me where I was from. I told him. He laughed. He said, I know your dad. Your dad sells seed corn. I bought a pocketknife at Ostby’s with my first paycheck from your dad’s cousin.”
She smiled a little. It didn’t last.
“He asked me to hold his hand. So I did. He asked me to tell his mom he wasn’t scared. So I said I would. He asked me if his dad would be mad that he got hit. I said no. I said his dad would be proud. I didn’t know his dad. I didn’t know if it was true. I said it anyway.”
“He died a little after four in the morning. I was still holding his hand.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“I sat there till the sun came up. Then I went back to the nurses’ hooch and I got out a piece of paper and I wrote a letter to Ellen Halvorsen. I’d never met her. I told her he wasn’t alone. I told her he’d talked about home. I told her he’d said he wasn’t scared, and that he’d asked about his dad. I told her he was brave.”
“I sent it through the chaplain. I never heard anything back. I didn’t expect to.”
“I came home in January of sixty-nine. I married your father that summer. I went to work at the hospital. I never said a word about any of it. Not to anyone. Not to your father, even. I put it in a box.”
She looked at me.
“In 1985, at a funeral at Our Savior’s, a woman came up to me in the fellowship hall. I didn’t know her. She took my hand and held onto it and said, Are you Margaret Lindahl? Were you a nurse in Pleiku? And I said yes. And she said, I’m Ellen Halvorsen. You wrote to me about Danny.”
My mother put her hand over her mouth.
“Seventeen years,” she said through her fingers. “She’d been trying to find me for seventeen years. She’d written to the Army. She’d written to the chaplain’s office. She didn’t know my married name. She found me because somebody at that funeral said I’d been an Army nurse and she heard it from across the room.”
“She told me Gus carried my letter in his wallet. Every day. She said he took it out and read it every night before bed. She said it was the only thing that let him sleep.”
“And she asked me not to tell him I was in town. She said he couldn’t bear to look at me. Not yet. She said someday he’d be ready.”
My mother wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Ellen died in 2009. Gus never said a word to me. Not one. In forty years of living in the same town. Not at church. Not at the grocery store. Not at the parade. He’d look at me sometimes. That was all.”
“And every Memorial Day, when that float went by, I stood up. For Danny. And for Gus.”
She was quiet.
“I didn’t know he was looking back,” she said.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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