Orders

If there was a leader of my biker family Hamp was it. I, Little E, was one of the few children allowed at the parties thrown nearly every weekend at one member’s house or another. In my patent leather shoes & frilly dresses, I flitted from one band of adults to another staying quiet & taking in all of the words and phrases I wasn’t quite ready to understand. Most took no notice. Others sent me for fresh brews or asked me to pass the smoldering roach to the next in rotation.

Hamps ole lady was Bess. Rail-thin with long, straight black hair, Bess was easily identified by her over-sized rose-colored glasses. Hamp & Bess shared a house & their lives, but Hamp would never ask Bess to be his wife. This was not some archaic biker regulation, but the truth.

Hamp cut an imposing figure. He stood over six feet tall, a giant to someone not yet old enough to start kindergarten. His dark hair was shoulder-length & kinky, with strategic but natural strips of white. And his beard was a perfect match. Jeans, combat boots and a wallet on a chain was the appropriate ensemble for any occasion.

Regardless of appearance, Hamp was a teddy bear. He never had any children of his own. I was enough. I sat on his lap & ran my fingers around the metal band soldered around his wrist, tracing the letters engraved on its face.

One afternoon my mom took me aside & asked me to please not ask Hamp about that band, saying that it would hurt his feelings. Of course I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but eventually my curiosity got the better of me.

Vietnam had touched the lives of nearly everyone in our fold, but it had touched no one with a crueler stroke more than Hamp. A bomber pilot, Hamp was passively detached from the death & destruction meted out in megatons below. When his plane touched down he tried to live, as much as anyone who deals in death can.

While in country, Hamp had found solace in a bungalow in a tiny village along a nothing river & made no plans to return to the States. He met an eighteen year-old girl & married her. The military was not impressed. He was called up for another tour. Today it was his wife’s family’s village down river. He knew first hand that unless rice paddies or ill-fed oxen had become strategic there was no point to the destruction that was to ensue.

Hamp, shaken & straining to find a way to spare his wife the pain of what he knew would result, he sent one of the young Vietnamese boys that hung around the base to find his wife’s family & tell them to leave. Procrastinating as long as he could, Hamp was nearly court-martialed for dereliction of duty.

Hamp dropped his bomb.

All the time in the world would not have changed the result. After a brow-beating from his commanding officer upon his return, Hamp looked for the boy he had sent on a fool’s errand, to no avail. Eventually, he sought refuge in his bungalow & the arms of his wife. Instead, he found a note in the struggling hand & broken English he had grown to love. His wife had gone to her parents’ village to give them a piece of news that could only be delivered in person. She would tell Hamp when she returned.

She would never come home & only Hamp knew why. He drove to the base & using his military-issued knife, removed a strip of metal from his plane. He took it to his buddy in the machine shop & had it engraved with the words, “GOD FORGIVE ME. I FOLLOWED ORDERS”. It was soldered around his wrist & was not removed, not even when he died.

After serving time in the stockade for destruction of property, Hamp left Vietnam & returned to our tiny town in northwest Indiana. He found Bess & that was the closest he would ever get to being domesticated again.

Years later Hamp was tooling around the back roads in the sweltering Midwest heat without a helmet. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and he hadn’t a care in his world. He owned acreage, had his toys & a band of brothers he could call any time day or night. Hamp was home, whether it was how he had envisioned it when he discovered love in the oppressive humidity of Vietnam.

As the sun beat down on his neck a branch dropped from an overhanging tree down into his lap. He wasn’t able to keep his hands on the steering wheel, lost control & crashed. His head met the worn pavement, but he was able to walk several miles to the next farm house & call for Bess. He maintained consciousness until she arrived, told her he loved her & died in her arms. That was the first & only time Hamp had ever been able to tell Bess he had loved her, but she knew that if he said it, he meant it.

GOD FORGIVE US ALL.