Nick, Jeff, Jan, and Rob in Rob’s backyard, around 1970. | Courtesy of Rob Pasick
It’s been nearly sixty years since my Ferndale High School classmates—Nick, Jeff, and I—set off on three very different paths during the Vietnam War.
When we all graduated from college in 1968, Nick enlisted and served as a grunt near the Cambodian border. Jeff became a conscientious objector, working in a Lansing hospital. I went to teach in Harlem, later spared from the draft by a lucky lottery number.
Nick came home wounded and haunted—physically by a punji-stick injury, and emotionally by the trauma of losing friends in a war that, by the end, few could explain.
He told me once about “a terrible ten days” near the Cambodian border:
“Captain Wheeler said, ‘Sgt. Luxon, get down there with your guys.’
One man said he wasn’t going—but he relented.
Lt. Thale asked permission to take the hill; the Captain said no.
We pulled out, the Air Force bombed it for days.
When we went back, spider holes all the way up, sixty bunkers on top—we blew them with C-4.
There must’ve been five hundred or more up there.
I was ready to tell Lt. Thale we weren’t going up with our ten remaining men.
Glad it didn’t come to that—we’d have been wiped out.”
Then, with that dry humor that soldiers use to survive, he said:
“Being a grunt in the jungle—rats, leeches, tarantulas, mosquitoes, ants, the occasional tiger.
Cold, hot, C-rations, dirty water, jungle rot.
You have to ask yourself what’s not to love about the jungle.”
That is Nick—able to find laughter in the unbearable.
When he came home, like so many Vietnam veterans, he came back to silence. No parades. No welcome. Too many were denied the care, dignity, and understanding they needed to heal.
Now, as that generation reaches their eighties, they live with the long tail of war—Agent Orange exposure, PTSD, chronic pain, addiction, and isolation. And our newer veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq face many of the same struggles: invisible wounds, bureaucratic barriers, and a society that moves on too quickly.
This isn’t about politics. It’s about promises—the ones we make to the young men and women who risk everything when we ask them to serve.
They do their duty. When they come home, it’s our turn to do ours.
Nick has eventually found his purpose again. He has spent his later years helping other veterans navigate the systems that once failed him. He found meaning in service, again — this time not through combat, but through compassion.
His story reminds me that the true cost of war is not only measured in battles fought overseas, but in the years afterward — in the hospitals, shelters, and quiet living rooms where veterans still carry their pain.
We owe them more than gratitude.
We owe them care.
And we owe them the chance to heal in peace.