[Vhfcn-l] Joe Galloway

[Ken Hand]

Julie, Wow and Thank You.

Ken Hand
Handy Car Care
248-613-8586
www.corvairmechanic.com

For those that have fought for it, Freedom has a flavor the protected will never know.


-----Original Message-----
From: Julie Kink via Vhfcn-l <vhfcn-l at lists.vhfcn.org>
To: Ken Hand <vairmech at aol.com>
Sent: Mon, Aug 23, 2021 12:58 pm
Subject: [Vhfcn-l] Joe Galloway

Thanks for reporting Joe's death, Ross. When Mike and I heard it last Wednesday I sat down and put my thoughts together for no particular reason, just for my own benefit. It helped.
He was the best writer I ever met.
Julie Kink
sister of WO David Kink C/1/9 CAV KIA 8-3-1969
********
8-18-2021
I feel a peculiar sadness on hearing of the death of Joe Galloway, co-author of We Were Soldiers Once And Young, and its sequel, We Are Soldiers Still. He was my friend. 
This is not meant to be one of those boastful, sobbing epistles written to attract admirers and convince them that we were “that close.” We didn’t vacation together. We didn’t meet for coffee or swap photos of grandchildren.  
Joe was simply a touchpoint for me, at the beginning of what has been the biggest journey of my life, and a mile-marker along the way, these past 28 years. 
I am a Gold Star sister. My 19-year-old brother was lost to the skies over Vietnam in 1969, when I was eight. Though he served four years after the infamous battle of the Ia Drang Valley where Joe cut his newpaperman’s teeth, my brother David was a helicopter pilot in the revered First Cavalry Division, which became Joe’s second family after his baptism there in the central highlands of Vietnam in the early part of the Vietnam War.  
In a sense, I credit Joe Galloway, and his friend General Hal Moore, with my awakening from a long sleep, and ultimately, with bringing me in contact with the men who would become my new big brothers.  
After my brother David’s death, there followed 24 long years during which I knew nothing about the pink spot on the map called “Vietnam” where he had briefly lived and died, nothing about the war in which he had given his all.  We never studied it in school. I never shared the fact, growing up, that I had lost my brother in the Vietnam War. The feeling that I needed to “discover” him, and learn about the war that took him from us, grew from a distant echo in my youth, to a lonesome, persistent longing in my college years. I needed to know, and understand, “our war.”   
And then, in 1993, I saw cross-legged on my living room couch watching an episode of ABC’s “Day One” news program, titled “They Were Young and Brave.” The documentary chronicled the five-day Ia Drang battle in 1965 that turned the course of the war, and shadowed the return, 28 years later, of the some of the pivotal players to the land where they had faced death, and seen their buddies perish. I was riveted. And I was crying my eyes out.  
I remember feeling very sorry for myself, thinking, “I’ll never find anyone who knew my brother.”   
Three years later, through a series of events that I now consider miraculous, I found myself in a crowded roomful of Vietnam veterans in a Washington, DC hotel, being introduced to Gen. Hal Moore as the sister of a fallen 1st Cavalry soldier. With the strongest handshake I’d ever experienced, and a firmly set jaw that I’ll never forget, Gen. Moore told me, “You’ll see him again.”  
He said the same words two years later, with the same firm handshake, when we were once again introduced.   
“Men who fight, shoulder to shoulder in battle . . . they’re brothers for life,” Moore said in the documentary.   
I could not know that, three years later, the pilot who had flown “high bird” on my brother’s last mission would write to me that “the bonds formed in combat are in many ways stronger than family” . . . that four years later, sitting in his study, my brother’s commanding officer would be telling me that the letter of condolence he wrote my mother in 1969 was his first . . . that 13 years later, I would be walking the old runway in Phuoc Vinh, Vietnam where my brother had flown during his one month there.   
Somewhere along the way, I met Joe, and we became friends. As a newspaper reporter myself, I greatly admired his writing skills, and I told him so. As my quest to learn more about my brother David progressed, I let Joe know how his eloquence had impacted me.   
Joe wrote,“julie:thank you for all the kind words about WWSOAY and the Day One program. hal moore and i always thought if we could help restore some pride in their service to even a few of our brother veterans...and help even a few grieving family members find some peace that all of it would be worth it. and so it is. that remains the prime intent of the forthcoming sequel...where we broaden the circle of healing to include our old enemies who did their best to kill us all...and we them. so much work to do and so little time left to do it in. gen. moore is wearing out...running down...and it breaks my heart to know this is our last operation together.”  
On July 2, 2000, I stood among more than 1,000 Vietnam helicopter pilots gathered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC for the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association Reunion, as Joe Galloway told them,   
“I love you guys as only an Infantryman can love you. No matter how bad things were….if we called you came. Down through the green tracers and other visible signs of a real bad day off to a bad start. . . To us you seemed beyond brave and fearless…..that you would come to us in the middle of battle in those flimsy thin-skinned crates…..and in the storm of fire you would sit up there behind that plexiglass seeming so patient and so calm and so vulnerable…..waiting for the off-loading and the on-loading. We thought you were God's own lunatics…..and we loved you. Still do.”  
After sending him my newspaper editorial about a veterans gathering I attended in Wisconsin, and what it meant to see veterans reunited close to my brother’s birthday of November 11th, Joe complimented me and shared a bit of personal history - a huge honor for me.   
“Julie:Keep doing what you do so well. The guys love that, and you as well. Us old Scorpios! My birthday is 13 November. In 1965 my birthday was spent under a tea bush in the Catecha Plantation. One of the guys gave me his can of pound cake to celebrate with. Next day I went into the Ia Drang Valley with Hal Moore's bunch, and the rest, as they say, is history. That was one hell of a birthday present. Yet I would happily march right in there again for the privilege of standing beside those guys and fighting alongside them. Funny how one move, one act, one decision can change your life for all time........God bless.Joe”  
A few years later Joe shared with a fellow veteran his great admiration for us Gold Star families, mentioning me and his then wife Karen Metsker:  
“People like Julie and Karen and all those kids have holes through their hearts just as certain as if they were shot with a .357. And yet they give back to us so much more than we are able to give them. God bless them all. rgds Joe”  
When I was about to leave for my first trip to Vietnam in 2006, I wrote to Joe, and to my surprise he wrote back.   
“Godspeed, Miss Julie, and God bless you on your journey. It is a beautiful land and most of the people are beautiful as well. Although it is neither beginning nor end i pray this journey adds a large measure of peace and calm to your heart. you deserve that and much more.as of june 1 i am quitting the day job at knight ridder and moving to my house on the south texas coast. winters there; summers in colorado with gen hal moore. we are beginning work on sequel to WWSOAY. plus i have about five more books to write solo after that one. again, Godspeed and Happy Trails to you!”  
I respected Joe because he was a “reporter’s reporter” - in the same sense that people refer to “a man’s man” - someone who draws out a larger meaning, perhaps, than its dictionary definition. I sensed that he had a deep-seated commitment to tell - starkly, without embellishment - the stories of the people whose lives he intersected either for a brief moment, or for decades. He had promised them that.   
He never let them down. Faced with the awful truths of life, and the poetic horror of death, he was adept at drawing the meaning out of both.   
It seems that when he left us, he grabbed hold of an entire era, and whisked it away with his leaving.   
Godspeed, and Happy Trails to you, my friend.  
Julie Kink



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