A Soldiers's Daughter

A Quarter for a Backscratch

I grew up a soldier’s daughter.

I was a daydreamer of a child, not knowing all that much about the world around me and less about the soldier that raised me.

He was not much more than a child when his parents read him a letter one day; this seventeen year old dreamer, this blue-eyed all American boy. He was the youngest of five. Raised on the football field, Grandpa’s hand-grown vegetables and Grandma’s brownie squares.

The letter promised his future. He would leave for camp. He would not play football at a university or continue his education. There would be war.
That football would be replaced with a rifle. His team shirt would be traded for a uniform of greens and gray. His new playing field: a jungle of underground trenches and a monsoon-filled forest.

I grew up this soldier’s daughter.

He left in January of 1967, his home, his family, his sweetheart . The next eleven months he would travel on foot through a foreign country. This boy that knew nothing more of the world than a white house on a hill on Main Street, America, and a few family picnics down an old dirt road.

Instead he’d see torrential rain that never ceased. Morning, noon or night. He’d eat from an aluminum can with a tin spoon, sleep under the light of ammunition and watch boys, as young as he, fall to their fate on a ground of bloodshed dirt.

This makeshift soldier lost his very best friend in December that year. To a boy about his age, hiding behind a single tree. He took the life of the enemy that day before he succumbed to the bullet himself. He would be rescued in helicopter, having left half of his soul in the jungle.

He would not be greeted at home, not by family, not by his sweetheart, and rested in a hospital twenty-five hundred miles from Main Street.

I grew up this soldier’s daughter.

Finally he would return home. Not a boy but a broken man. His football dream a memory. His future uncertain. He married his sweetheart and a short time later, he was blessed with a daughter and three more in a row. He built us a home with his own hands and made a living of electricity and repair.

That soldier rode us in a wheelbarrow through a backyard of leaves, fed us his very own hand grown vegetables, and put that first ball in our hands and showed us how to play it.

It was Saturday morning, after a week long of labor, that soldier would ask me for a back scratch. A back scratch for a quarter. He’d sit up straight, this grown up blue-eyed All American boy and I’d scratch his his back all for a quarter and a smile.

As I sat there he’d ask about my week and I filled the room with little girl stories, always wondering as I scratched his back, about the mark on his back. It was all of six inches long, longer than my little girl hand, and it scarred him clear across his shoulder blade. I never asked, for I feared it, and more so the answer.

I grew up this soldier’s daughter.

He waited as long as it took me to grow up and find my own ‘football’ dreams, and told me about the day he suffered his scar. It wasn’t from an old sport injury, a hero quarterback play, but a wound suffered in Vietnam on a day in December of 1967.

That scar, that very scar I would scratch for a quarter, had given me freedom, had given me and every other daughter , son, and family, the gift of liberty, and justice, and the pursuit of dreams. He may not have seen his own All American dream through, but he worked his entire grownup life making sure I did.

I grew up this soldier’s daughter.

And there’s no prouder way to grow up.