Veteran’s Day Holds Memories Of A Unique Vet

LANCE CPL. NICHOLS PASSED IN 2015; LONG AFTER VIET NAM’S HORROR FADED

He was and is still a childhood friend.

He will always be a reminder of the price of war that is exacted from young, viral men and women in our nation.

His name was Calvin Eugene Nichols. We called him by his family nickname: Punkin.

Not pumpkin, but a Southeast Arkansasism of that proper English word. He was the eighth child in a family of eight. He always laughed that the family found him in the “pumpkin patch” since his elderly parents thought they were past childbearing years.

After his final return to Arkansas and Bradley County from Viet Nam, I always liked to call him “Lance Cpl. Nichols.

He liked that. He has certainly earned that respect, according to the Marine Corps. I’ve never once doubted he was owed that title and much more for his service to this nation.

Born the eighth child, to Cal and Maude Nichols, his family worked at tomato farming, timber cutting and sawmill work. They all have done well.

“Punkin,” as we knew him, got a late start on school. His aging mother needed him at home, until the Wonder Bread man told the school district about the rural child out along Arkansas 15 who needed to be in school.

He did OK in school. A strapping big boy, he was always a size or two above his letter grade in school.

As the Viet Nam war was raging, “Punkin,” seeking a better start in life than a high school diploma and a shift at the saw mill, joined the Marines on March 28, 1968.

I saw him once in his dress khaki uniform back for a visit before he shipped out to that faraway place we heard about on the news every evening called Viet Nam.

He was a tall, lanky, raw-boned chiseled soldier. His boyhood personality of never meeting a stranger, ready with a joke or prank was also honed into one of adult respect, manners and sincerity.

He would be back from Viet Nam in a scant few months.

Struck down and severely wounded by a sniper on a rice paddy patrol in the Mekong Delta, he had seen intense combat.

Now he was wounded. And he would forever be wounded from war.

After a lengthy military hospital stay and rehabilitation he was sent back home, forever a patient of the VA Hospitals across the South. He wore a large, black eye-patch after the style of the fictional Rooster Cogburn in the original release of “True Grit.”

There were other scars we would never see.

Some never healed, that I know.

But despite all the scars and wounds, he was the same, yet a somewhat matured and guarded individual after that.

He was still a proud man, a proud Arkansan, a proud American and more so, a proud Marine.

Lance Cpl. Nichols rightly received the Purple Heart Medal. He also received the Combat Action Ribbon, Vietnam Service Medal, Vietnam Campaign Medal and the National Defense Medal.

He died childless in a Southeast Arkansas nursing home where the VA was providing for his care. He enjoyed many years of a somewhat normal life with the scars of Viet Nam ever present in his activities.

He loved country music and took trips to Branson, Mo., when the heyday of that tourist facility was a place where country music and patriotism were at its zenith.

Lance Cpl. Nichols never talked about the ill- hand dealt him in serving his country. He didn’t complain about the VA no matter how they failed him and countless others.

He was buried with the flag draped on his coffin. The obligatory 21-gun salute was given him as the 67-yearold was laid to rest near his parent’s graves.

This Veteran’s Day please give Lance Cpl. Nichols and other veterans your personal salute.

Wherever they are today — active or now at home — the veterans of our nation deserve it.