Memorial Day meditation: Wars don’t end when the troops come home, as Army veteran Bob Chastek discovered
Editor’s Note: On this Memorial Day, we honor and remember those who have fought to defend our freedom. As we pray for all the brave men and women serving in our military forces today, we remember a soldier who was close to us, in this article written in 1990.
By James P. Gannon
In the last few summers of his life, Bob Chastek sought peace in the north woods of Minnesota.
“He went up north during summers to help take care of resorts, mowing lawns,” his mother Margaret recalled in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. “He had to be outdoors. Nature was quieter for him. Here at my house it was — cars backfiring, and planes going over. … It was better for him outside.”
The peace Bob Chastek hungered for was an elusive thing in the 19 years after he returned from war. Vietnam was the pivot point of his life, upon which everything revolved. The half-life lived after the war was the dark side of his 39 years.
You could picture Bob Chastek playing himself in one of those war movies where the platoon always includes a certain cast of characters. He was the Minnesota farm boy — tall, gangly, earnest, hardworking, obedient to duty.
When he felt the draft bearing down in 1969, he enlisted in the Army and volunteered for helicopter training. Bob was “always interested in flying,” his mother said. “He could fix anything that had a motor running.”
It took some winking at the rules to get the lanky 19-year-old into a helicopter outfit. “He was too tall, but they needed them so desperately that they showed him how to stoop so he would fit,” his mother said. “He grew more after he got in, but when he finished he was six-six. Long arms and long body.”
They made him a door gunner on the big Huey choppers that ferried U.S. troops in and out of battle zones. It was a horrible job. Margaret describes the routine: “They took them out and left them off. And then they would go back to get them, and they would be in pieces.”
Bob Chastek put in his year-long tour of duty, surviving against the odds in a high-risk job. Then he signed up for another six months. He was wounded and hospitalized, but wanted to finish his tour. “He could have come home, I guess, but he didn’t want to leave his group there,” his mother explained.
It was in those final months he saw his closest friends die. “That’s when his buddies got it, in the last six months, but he didn’t,” Margaret said. “And I said, several times in the last three years, he should have died in Vietnam with them, because he couldn’t ever get over them.”
When he returned home, his war should have been over — but in its most devastating effect, it was just beginning. Margaret remembered: “When he got off in San Diego, they spit at him — the protesters. He couldn’t figure out what in the hell was going on back here, he said. He couldn’t get it. Never did. He said, ‘God, I didn’t go over there because I wanted to. I was sent.’ It was rough for him. He had so much pain.”
Then the nightmares began. “The nightmares just drove him. He was afraid to sleep. It got worse and worse instead of better,” Margaret said. He tried counseling offered by the Veterans Administration. “They meant well but it just didn’t fill it. His hurt was too deep. His pain was too deep.”
His life became a series of odd jobs and unfinished things, interrupted by nightmares. “I remember one time when I opened the door when I heard him thrashing around and yelling and groaning,” Margaret said. “My curtains were wound around his long arm. I startled him. And if he’d have had a hand grenade or a gun in his hand, he would have shot me, not knowing who I was. I never opened the door again. But I would wake him by rapping and pounding on the door.”
At night, his mind replayed the videotape of Vietnam, over and over. He was back in the combat zone, pulling wounded GIs into the chopper.
Scenes from the videotape now live with Margaret. “This one particular buddy had both arms and legs shot off, and Bob held him in his arms . . . and he kept yelling at Bob, ‘Push me out the door! I can’t go home like this. Push me out! Push me out!’ Bob heard him until the last.”
The end came two weeks ago in the bedroom of his mother’s home, when the door gunner ended his nightmares with one final pull on the trigger of a gun.
They won’t make a movie about Bob Chastek. He wasn’t born on the fourth of July, and he didn’t become a war protester. He did his duty in war and never found tranquility in peace. Last week, his mother received a card from President Bush, expressing his sympathy, and saluting Bob Chastek, a Minnesota farm boy, for his service to the country.
Originally published February 11, 1990, in The Detroit News, this article is taken from my book, A Life in Print: Selections from the work of a reporter, columnist and editor (Blackwater Publications, 2005).
-- James P. Gannon
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