Chapter One, Part 2: The Fabric of Our Lives

Not long after my youngest sister Nancy was born, my mom crocheted an afghan blanket that ended up being kept on the back of the couch in the den.  It was half decoration, half functional item, and it was part of the landscape of the various houses in which we lived over the course of the next twenty years or so.  The colors of the yarn in the blanket were those of popular décor back in the 1970’s, mostly different shades of browns.  Looking at the blanket, though, it was easy to spot the one color in the mix that really stood out, not because it took up the most space in the pattern but because it was the brightest, a brilliant shade of orange, like the tip of a flame in a campfire that has been burning for awhile. 

The orange in that blanket is like the sport of running has been in my family over the years, something that stood out amongst whatever else was happening at the time, a mainstay or maybe even a theme sorts.  Not everybody in my family is a runner, but everyone in the family knows about running and appreciates the talent and the dedication behind it, because of what we assimilated through my dad’s enthusiasm for it. 

My dad started running when he was in elementary school; he said that he liked to race the bus to his house after school.  In high school, he was a competitive middle-distance runner on his school’s track team, and he was awarded an athletic scholarship to Troy State (now Troy University) in Troy, Alabama, after graduation from high school.  He continued to excel as a runner through his tour in Vietnam, which started a year later, and then again as a college student on the GI Bill at Auburn University. 

After he graduated from college, my dad got a job with Cook Industries, a company for which he worked for the next ten years, a time during which the company required my dad and my family to move many times.  Through it all and in the decades that followed, my dad ran, for sport, for social reasons, and for health and fitness.  I heard him say many times that he loved to run because it made it feel better, because he got to meet all kinds of people and see all kinds of things through doing it, and because he liked to have a goal.  “Plus,” he almost always added with a smile, “That way I can drink a few beers without worrying about putting on weight!”

Dad called on me to join him as a runner when I was in the fourth grade.  I’d run laps around the track here and there while I was waiting for him to finish his workout a few times in the past as a young child, but it wasn’t until I was in late elementary school that he thought I was ready for an actual training program.  With the two of us in training, there were always smelly running clothes and shoes and endless bottles of Gatorade around the house.  As a family, our weekends began to center around road races in the area in which we ran; occasionally my sisters joined in the effort too with Mom backing us up as Head Cheerleader/Nurse/Logistics Manager. This continued throughout my middle school and high school years, and then, when I became more of a recreational runner during my college years, it extended to the running days of my sister Nancy, who was also competitive in cross-country and track during her time in high school. 

During this time, Dad was typically running in excess of 100 miles per week, often in training for a marathon or some other big race in which he was set to compete.  Sometimes we cheered him on from the sidelines as spectators, and sometimes we joined him in his running efforts, whether training for an event or running in a race, always with him running along with persistence and triumph etched into the expression his face and a can-do attitude that, in victory and in defeat, through challenges and transitions, eventually also became one of the strands of the fabric of our lives as a family.

Dog Tags

Sometimes when I think back to during the time when my dad was sick, I remember a detail that I had forgotten or overlooked in my memories before.  

Today I remembered his dog tags.

When I was growing up, whenever I asked my dad about his experience serving in Vietnam, he always talked about how his job there was to guard a building with weapons in it, often on an overnight shift.  

My dad was never a "night owl;" as far back as I can remember, he was much more of a morning person, and I guess that was true when he was in the service, too, because he often commented when he talked about that time about how hard it was for him to stay awake on his overnight shifts.  He said he usually ran around and around the building he was assigned to guard so that he would stay awake and alert during those shifts.  The only problem with this plan, he reported, was that he had to wear his dog tags at all times and, as they hung from the chain around his neck, they drove him crazy bouncing against his chest as he ran.  Ever the improviser, though, he thought of a solution to this problem too: he took the dog tags off from around his neck and put them in his pants - in his jock strap, to be exact. 

It's kind of funny to think that a person can be proud of someone else before that person was even born or before they knew each other, but I know it's possible, because, picturing my dad as a young soldier in a foreign land, before I was born, doing what he had to do to get his job done and to defend our country, I feel such a sense of pride and respect, the same pride and respect that I have had for him throughout my life. 

But those dog tags from Dad's days in Vietnam aren't the ones I think about most often these days.  The dog tags on my mind are the ones that Dad wore on a chain around his neck as a 66 year-old man as he trained for the Ironman triathlon.  He tucked those into his shirt as he rode his bike or ran, and, the day before he became disoriented on a run and our campaign against his brain cancer began, the chain that held those dog tags broke.  And so, on that fateful day, he set out for the first time in many months without any form of identification at all.  

I think when most people think about dog tags, they think about toughness.  That's what I think about, too, because it was that, along with his strength and resilience that day that allowed Dad to dig deep enough so that, even in his state of confusion coming from the tumor the size of a racquetball in his brain, he could remember not just his home phone number (which was called first by the police but went unanswered because my mom was out of town) but also my aunt's cell phone number, which he also recalled and then gave to the police who had been called to the scene because he somehow also remembered that my mom was out of town that day and realized he needed to call someone local.

I have spent time, some while Dad was sick and even more since he went on ahead, thinking about how things would have likely gone had he not had the fortitude to pull out that information in those few moments before he was taken to the hospital by ambulance, before he had a couple of seizures, and before he quit breathing and had to be put on life support temporarily until he could be stabilized.  It is nothing short of terrifying to think that all of that would have been going on and no one in our family would have been able to be notified so that we could all get there to be with him.  It's horrifying to think about the fact that he would have been a Missing Person for an undetermined amount of time, because, with my mom out of town overnight that night, it is highly likely that no one would have realized that he didn't make it home after his run that afternoon.  We would not have known that anything out of the ordinary was going on.  Again and again, it hits me that, even with as bad as it was when he first got sick and throughout his illness, it could have been worse.  At least we knew where he was, and what was going on with him, and at least we were able to be with him. 

Dad, wearing the dog tags, competing in what ended up being his last race, one month prior to his diagnosis of brain cancer

In the days just before and just after his surgery, Dad worried a lot about what he called "loose ends."  As it would be for any of us whose life was put on hold in the blink of an eye, it was unnerving and extremely anxiety-causing for Dad that he had not been able to prepare for the time he was having to miss work and everything else for which he considered himself to be responsible.  In the midst of the constant stream of worries he had about his health and about needing to take care of the responsibilities in his personal and professional roles in life, he said he wanted to get the chain that had held his dog tags fixed, "so that I'll have it ready as soon as I can get back on the road."

And so, sitting in the hospital room with him in the Neuro-ICU, I searched on the Internet and found a company that sold replacement chains and ordered one for him; he was visibly relieved when I told him that a new chain was being sent to him in the mail.  And that's where the meaning of those dog tags deepens in our story; instead of standing only for toughness, Dad's dog tags also represented Hopefulness, and we desperately needed everything we could get to bolster both of those qualities as we entered into a more grueling battle than any of us could even imagine at that point.

Photos From Vietnam

Airman 4 William Bullard

I recently came across some photos that I had never seen before that my Dad took while he was serving in the Air Force, including pictures from the Philippines and Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Dad running in Vietnam

What is it about War that so often draws grown met back to it in their memories when they are nearing the end of their journey?  Is it that it was so terrible, that it transformed them, that it gave them perspective, that it “grew them up”, that it was something they regretted, or that it was something they were so proud to have done?

The only things I ever remember my dad telling me while I was growing up about his time in Vietnam was that it was a beautiful country to which he’d one day like to return and that his job there was guarding weapons on the night shift.  To keep himself awake during his shift, he often ran around the perimeter of the storage area he was guarding.  He said he hated it when his dog tags hit against his chest when he ran, and so, since he knew he had to have them on his person at all times, he just put them into his jock strap while he ran.

Dad at Clark AFB

A water buffalo in Vietnam ~ photo by BB

During the time that Dad was sick, though, on several occasions he talked about Vietnam and his time in the Air Force.  When he had the high fever that landed him in the hospital for the second and final time, he was hallucinating from the pain, the fever, and later from the medicine they gave him to try to relieve the first two.  As they often do in the hospital, a nurse asked him what his level of pain was on a scale of 1 to 10 when he was admitted.  Even around the time of his diagnosis and brain surgery, I’d never heard him say that his pain was more than a 7, but this time he said it was a 9.

We wanted the nurse to take note that his 9 was like most other people’s 109; he just didn’t notice pain like other people and, when he did, he didn’t complain about it or let it stop him from doing anything.  He immediately tried to retract the 9, though, by saying, “I don’t want to complain!  I don’t want to be a wimp!  Soldiers in trenches in Vietnam had their legs blown off and they could say their pain is a 9, but I shouldn’t say that!”  If anyone had asked me what the level of pain in my heart was on a scale of 1 to 10 at that time, I would have said a 10+. 

One thing I haven’t gotten to yet in this blog is that my family is also grieving for my dad’s mother, who died a little less than four months after my dad did.  Grandmom was fiercely independent, but she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease for about three years.  She was very religious and, at 90 years old, was one of those people who has lived her life and was ready to go on ahead.  Thus, her passing brought us a different kind of grief.  Grief, still, though, and maybe there is more to come from her passing because we are still trying to move through the Quicksand of Grief after Dad’s death. 

Border between Laos and Vietnam ~ photo by BB

At Hundred Islands (Philippines)

"Sure beats a tent!" Dad wrote on the back of this one

"Market Place on Laos Border" ~ photo by BB

Monks in Vietnam ~ photo by BB

Mt. Lemmon Air Force Station ~ photo by BB

"Negrito at Negrito Village," Dad wrote on the back.

Radar Station at Mt. Lemmon AF Station ~ photo by BB

"Typical Thai family house," Dad noted on this one

The pictures I found were ones that he had mailed to his mother while he was overseas.  Like Grandmom did with all correspondence that she’d ever received, she filed those photos away for future reference, and they were part of what my parents saved from her house when they packed up her belongings when she moved into the nursing home. 

My dad’s mom wasn’t the kind of person who held children in her lap or spouted out frequent I love you’s or you’re so cute’s, but she was fiercely proud of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, and she let us know that in her own way.  I imagine her heart almost burst with pride and at the same time almost broke with fear and sadness many years ago when she watched her teenaged son board the bus that was bound for the Air Force base from where he was going to the Vietnam War.




 Grandmom wasn’t unloving or unemotional, she was practical:  when she told Dad goodbye when he left to go to Vietnam, she didn’t cry.  I asked her about it once, how it was to let him go into such a dangerous place, to go off to war, to go away on a journey that he might not come back from and from which he certainly wouldn’t come back as the same person.  She said, “I didn’t see the point of crying; crying seemed useless and wasteful, and I didn’t want to make him worry or feel badly that he had to go.  He was going, there was nothing I could do about it.  I just hoped and prayed that he would get there safely, and I made myself think about how wonderful it would be when I got to see him again.”

Ironic, because now that I think about what she said, I realize that those were the same words that went through my head on the day that my dad died.

You were a brave soldier to the end, Dad.  I hope you made it just fine and that it’s beautiful over there; I hope that you can tuck in your dog tags or your angel wings or whatever you have over there while you’re running in the clouds.  I'm making myself think about how wonderful it will be when I get to see you again one day.

Dad and his best friend Wayne on a patriotic run, celebrating America the Beautiful