For the most of the afternoon he sat quietly on the floor cross-legged just staring-with dark, sunken eyes-straight ahead at the tiny B&W television we had in the living room. When offered a beer he guzzled it quickly, and then another. Dinner was some of my Mom’s famous homemade chili, which he gulped down quickly.

He had a hunting knife in a leather sheath outside his brown cowboy boots. At one point he took out the knife and began to clean his fingernails.

“He’s like that all the time. Really quiet,” said Barb. “And at night he has nightmares and shouts out names.”

(Years later, when I started to read up on the war, I would learn about this “1,000 yard stare” that many veterans experienced.)

Johnny fared no better. Once a promising young drummer in the Illinois Valley, he had lost interest in playing when he came back and went back to work at the same garage he had worked at before he had gone to Nam.

I once overheard Mom talking to one of her friends how much Johnny had changed since he had been back. I saw him once or twice a few months after his return, but I couldn’t see how he had changed. He had short hair at first, but he grew his long blonde locks back in a few months. He wore his army fatigue shirt a lot with a large peace symbol sewn on the back. I thought that was pretty cool.

Once, when my Mom was talking on the phone with a friend I heard her say “shell shocked” but I didn’t know what that meant.

“He’s not the same Johnny I used to know,” my Mom said.

No one ever talked about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That was not part of the vernacular when used to describe the past generations of fighting men that had defended America’s honor, but which had become more pronounced in veterans returning from Vietnam. It would be years for people started talking about that openly and before it was properly treated.

What was talked or known about returning veterans, at least indirectly, was how some veterans were depicted on television dramas and in the movies-either they were crazed drug addicts getting in trouble with the law or emotional misfits. I still remember one episode of Hawaii Five-O where a returning veteran gets involved with drugs.

Later, the first wave of movies about returning veterans like Heroes (starring Henry Winkler, yes the “Fonz” and Harrison Ford), Coming Home and The Deer Hunter reminded viewers of this other kind of “body count” about the difficulties and hardships-both mental and physical-many veterans faced coming back home.

(Ironically, thirty-eight years after the Vietnam War officially ended with the fall of Saigon we are seeing the same kind of “body count” with many veterans returning from Iraq suffering from PTSD.)

Jody did not talk much about the war when he came back. He had studied art before he had been drafted but when he came back, he had lost interest. He moved back in with his mom and I would see him on and off for the next couple of years before I finally left home in 1976 (to join the Air Force).

I saw John a few times after that Sunday afternoon he came over. Wonder what happened to him and if he made out okay. I never knew what happened to Johnny after I saw him those few times after he had come back. I often passed the garage where he worked at in LaSalle and I think I heard someone once say that he ended up owning that garage and that he had gotten into customizing cars. I hope he made out okay, too