That's why men in their sixties and seventies sit in their dens and recreation rooms around America and know that nothing in their life will equal the day they parachuted into St. And how do you explain that to your wife, your children, your parents, or your friends? But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since. War is ugly, horrible, evil, and it is reasonable for men to hate all that. Ask me, ask any man who has been to war about his experience, and chances are we'll say we don't want to talk about it-implying that we hated it so much, it was so terrible, that we would rather leave it buried. And as I drove back from Vermont in a blizzard, my children asleep in the back of the car, I had to admit that for all these years I also had loved it, and more than I knew. "What people can't understand," Hiers said, gently picking up each tiny rabbit and placing it in the nest, "is how much fun Vietnam was. Hiers built a nest of rabbit fur and straw in his barn and positioned a lamp to provide warmth against the bitter cold. The first morning we were up at dawn trying to save five newborn rabbits. A few months later I visited Hiers and his wife, Susan, in Vermont, where they run a bed-and -breakfast place. Then one day he went home, and fifteen years passed before we met by accident last winter at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. For months we were seldom more than three feet apart. He was nineteen then-my wonderfully skilled and maddeningly insubordinate radio operator. I last saw Hiers in a rice paddy in Vietnam.
You can read every story we've ever published on Esquire Classic. The story originally ran in the November 1984 issue.
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