Soldiers' tales - 1: Rudy

The trip that eventually leads a person to the Downtown East Side -- or any Skid Row locale -- can start pretty much anywhere. I learned that early on -- actually, from a Quebecois named Gilbert, whom I got to know in Victoria early in my own walk. He had come from a very well-to-do background, but bad decisions and alcohol blew landed him on Broad Street, sitting on the sidewalk in the broiling sun with a baseball cap at his feet. More about him another time.

Rudy was a man I met at Rainbow Mission in 2005. He was in his late 50s or early 60s, and one evening as people were lining up to get their dinner, he got his and came over and sat next to me. I forget how the conversation started -- he may have come up to ask for prayer -- and it was the first time I'd met someone who actually preferred to be living on the streets. "When I got back from Vietnam," he said, "me and some buddies tried to rent an apartment, but after all that time in the jungle, we couldn't have four walls around us. I couldn't anyway. So I joined up with some guys living out of vans down off the highway near Tacoma. We were called the 'rubber tramps'."

I don't think I'd ever met a Vietnam veteran before. "What was that like?"

It was a four-word question with a twenty-minute answer. The part that I really remember involved him seeing his whole advance party get wiped out.

"We got ambushed," he said. "VOOM! We returned fire and when it was over, everyone was gone. Except me. And I guess we got all of them, too, or they thought they got all of us and run off. But then I looked around, and I'm face to face with Charlie Cong. He's maybe 20 yards away. He looks at me. I look at him. 'If he goes for his gun,' I thought, 'I'm dead'. Then he holds up two fingers. I figure he's giving me the 'peace' sign, so I hold up two fingers. Then I realize -- he's askin' for a cigarette. So I pull out my pack o' smokes, and he comes over and I give him one. And we sat there and had our smoke. And he pulls out a picture of his wife and kids and we use sign language 'cause Charlie can't speak English and I can't speak Vietnamese. And we finish our smokes, and he goes back into the jungle.

"I got back to my camp and told my commanding officer what happened. I says, 'I can't kill these guys. Get me outta here.' The CO got me medicaled out the next day."

That led to the failed experience with the apartment in Seattle and the stint with the rubber tramps -- and the fact that Rudy could never hold down a job or a residence and was now, by choice, living on the streets in Vancouver.

Rudy was one of three Vietnam vets who came into Rainbow Mission. Clive -- very soft-spoken and kindly, but totally messed-up -- and Abraham -- an amazingly inspiring man -- were the other two. I'll write about them later. Meeting them -- particularly Clive and Rudy, left me thinking that some of the bigger casualties of war are the survivors -- the ones who came home. I understand there was a tendency to vilify the returning soldiers; on top of that, there are the deep thinkers like Michael Moore, among others, who point to evidence that the Tonkin Gulf "crisis" that led to increased US involvement in Vietnam was really a put-up job. Do they help the Rudys of this world, or is it enough for them to be right?

Was that what Rudy came home to? Did he have access to help in re-adjusting and if he did, did he understand that it was available? Or was he left in that confused state of watching guys no older than himself get wiped out in an ambush and finding real human interaction through sign language with a young father known only as Charlie Cong?

Rudy was a regular at the Rainbow Mission, and two weeks later he came up to me and said he was finally getting into Detox, and hopefully a rehab program for his cocaine addiction. We prayed together and I gave him a hug and he clung to me and shook with fear.

A couple of days later, he phoned to say he was alright. A couple of days after that, I called the detox centre to ask about him and was told they didn't give out patient information.

That was the last I saw of him.