Corporal Gerald Ernest Corlett

This is long, but well worth it.
In 1969, I was an eighth-grade student at Fassett Junior High School in suburban Oregon, Ohio. When the morning bell rang, it was customary for the students to rise and say the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer, despite the Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling that such prayers were an unconstitutional exercise of religion by the state. As a protest against American foreign policy, particularly the war in Vietnam, I remained seated throughout both. My teacher, Mrs. Finkbiener, a distractingly attractive twenty-something, decided my actions were disrupting the class. She ordered me to stand in the hall when the bell rang and reenter the room after the pledge and prayer. I complied, as I was generally a good kid. However, the next year and particularly as an adult, I would regret my compliance decision.
Very early on or about the morning of March 19, 1970, my mother made me answer a knock on our door. Two men in military uniforms were on our enclosed porch asking for my parents. I told them I’d go get my mom. My mother came down the stairs and peeked through the door at the men. I lingered on the stairway to hear what was going on. “Are you Mrs. Corlett?” they asked. “Yes.” She replied. “ You have a son, Gerald Ernest Corlett, serving in Vietnam?” they asked. “Yes.” She replied again. “Ma’m, it is my sad duty to inform you that on March 16, 1970, your son Gerald Ernest Corlett was killed in the line of duty in Vietnam.” I cannot erase the memory of her horrified wail as the news sank in. My own cries quickly drowned them out. My younger sister woke from the commotion and joined in.
The men stayed long enough for us to compose ourselves somewhat. They explained that the Army always sent them out in pairs and the duty of informing families that the worst had happened were rotated among them. They explained that my brother’s best friend, Ken Vas, who was an active-duty Green Beret, would be accompanying my brother’s body home in about a week. My mother called my dad who was at work at the Toledo Jeep automotive plant. When she got him on the line her exact words were “Bill, come home.” And that was all she said. This was starting to freak me out, because you just didn’t call my dad home from work. Even when one of us kids broke a bone or wrecked a car, it just wasn’t done. But now it was. My grandfather arrived soon and when given the news, he began to sob. This was the man who could smack his finger with a hammer when he missed a nail and not cry. First my dad gets called home from Jeep and now the strongest man I know on the planet is crying as hard as I am. Two never-seen-before events in my life happen within an hour of each other. If Grandpa is crying, we are in some seriously deep poop. My world has come off its axis.
Perhaps to find some normality, I composed myself, got on the school bus and went to school. My news spread like wildfire. The week waiting for my brother’s body to come home was the longest of my life. When his body arrived, there was great debate among the adults as to whether or not I, at fifteen years of age, were mature enough to handle seeing him as there would be no open casket. I remember telling them that if they denied me, I would break into the funeral home at night. I would not be denied. Fortunately, they relented. As they raised the coffin lid, I recognized my brother immediately. There was a sheet of glass between his body and the lid. Apparently the Army embalmed the dead in Vietnam and sealed them in for safety. His hair was full of static electricity and stuck oddly to the silk pillow on which his head rested. I had never seen my brother wearing make-up until now but that wasn’t nearly as disconcerting as the way the flesh after his chin turned into flesh-colored plastic that was wrinkled unnaturally and stuffed into his collar. Obviously, his neck was missing.
Despite the visual images, I was greatly comforted by the certainty of knowing my brother was really dead. I would survive this tragedy, but my parent’s twenty-five-year marriage would not. They divorced within a year. The North Vietnamese soldier that shot my brother got three kills in one. My brother died along with my parent’s marriage as well as my adolescence. This completely adult tragedy was laid at the doorstep of a fifteen-year-old. Hoping to avert the pain for others that I was experiencing, it was also the birth of a radical anti-war protestor. As the Assistant Editor of the Clay High Eagle student newspaper, I covered the speech by anti-war activist Jane Fonda at the University of Toledo in 1972. Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, the Rand Corporation analyst who revealed the top secret Pentagon Papers, showing the government believing victory in the Vietnam war unobtainable, was given the longest and loudest standing ovation I’ve ever heard.
However, I would not have the courage of my convictions. I registered for the Selective Service System, the draft, after my eighteenth birthday on November 3, 1973, afraid of the penalty of law. The same year, Dr. Daniel Ellsberg faced a potential sentence of life in prison if convicted of espionage charges for revealing the top secret Pentagon Papers and didn’t lose his nerve. It is one of the biggest regrets in my life, second only to having dropped out of college. I will never show such weakness of character again as long as I live.
At a memorial dinner last October, my brother Thomas was told by the guy who held my brother Jerry in his arms as he died that he wasn't shot through the neck and didn't die instantly as the Army claimed. He was shot through the stomach as was conscious as he slowly bled to death, the intense hostile fire making a life-saving rescue impossible.