I met Paul Nelson while working on the locked psychiatry ward at the University of Minnesota Hospital. We were orderlies together on the ward for a couple of years and became friends. When I married my first wife, Paul was the first person we had over for supper. Once I entered medical school and stopped working on the ward, we saw each other less often. In March of 1969 news came to me that he had been killed in Viet Nam. In July of that same year I began my service in the US Air Force.
Paul was one of the good guys, one to whom laughing came easily, and the sort of person to whom performing kind acts came to naturally. He would have been 84 years old now, but that unnecessary war shortened his life to age 27. When each Memorial Day rolls around I think about him.
Put all of the generals, the secretaries of defense, the presidents, the planners and prosecutors of that ugly conflict on one side of a scale and Paul on the other, and if the measurement used is who was most of value to this country … for me, he wins.
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Little Home In The Valley 