Charlie

There is a black wall in Washington D. C. with the names of over 58,000 Charlies on it. My Charlie was just a guy like them who got caught up in somebody else’s fight and paid the ultimate price. And every Charlie on that wall left behind buddies and families and a few people he didn’t know who touched his life in some way. Here we meet Harry and Cap Steiner. They were two of those people.

Harry, the corpsman isn’t the squeaky clean, upstanding model citizen we want to put forth as our ideal all American Boy. He has his problems. But because of Charlie he comes to face them. There is Cap Steiner, the flight nurse who gets a reluctant Harry to agree to escort Charlie home. By interceding on Charlie’s behalf, she moves Harry toward self-awareness and the redemption he needs.

All the characters in Charlie represent a microcosm of their larger society with all its warts and lumps and ultimate decency. Sometimes they live lives they wouldn’t write home about. Charlie, Harry and Cap lived in two worlds, the military and civilian and that was hard for everyone to reconcile during the turbulent years of Vietnam. They all were just trying to get by as best they could.