JAMES MURPHY

Jim Murphy handed me a photo before he said a word.

I was behind the counter at my supply house, expecting another customer looking for air-conditioning parts. Instead, a stranger held out an eight-by-ten of a puppy sitting on a boulder. I stared at it until my brain backtracked twenty-six years. Chills ran down my back. We looked at each other and yelled it at the same time — “King” — then grabbed each other in a hug and said welcome home.

That was 1995. Jim became more than a friend after that. He became the man who gave me a second perspective on the worst night of my life.

During the June 16, 1969, sapper attack, his hooch was one of the first bunkers destroyed. He survived with a mild concussion — lucky, considering. I was out with my Reaction Team, hunting sappers inside our own perimeter, too busy to know how big the enemy force really was. Jim was closer to the center of our defenses, with full access to company and brigade frequencies. He heard the airstrikes get called in, the fire missions, every radio transmission I made that night. He had the wide view. I only had mine.

Because of Jim, I know a platoon of Viet Cong sappers hit the mountain — elite soldiers, naked bodies covered in charcoal dust and grease, wearing nothing but loincloths. Our perimeter was breached in three places. My sector took the worst of it. Most of what I know about Marvin White, I know because of Jim and the men who stood the bunker line beside him.

For twenty years after, we met every year at the American Legion convention in Wildwood. Seafood at The Lobster House. We’d trade whatever new pieces of the story had surfaced since the last time we talked.

His PTSD nightmares didn’t start until twenty-six years after the attack. Five years after that, the stress caught up with him and he had a stroke. In 2015, another stroke killed him.

I lost a man who gave me the other half of a story I could only see one side of.