On the day Steve Miller went to Washington to see Max Cleland, Max looked up from his wheelchair and said, “Gimme a hug.”
Here were two old friends, a warrior and a healer, greeting each other this time in an office instead of a hospital ward. That’s where they’d met years earlier, at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where the medics kept bringing in the wounded and the maimed.
Max, out of Lithonia, Ga., and the fighting in Vietnam, was there to recover from his wounds. Steve, out of Northwest Baltimore and the University of Maryland, was there to offer physical therapy and help Max and other injured vets get back to the land of the living.
So when Steve walked in on this April afternoon in 2004, Max looked up and said, “Gimme a hug.” Steve bent over and extended both arms. But Max in his wheelchair could only return half an embrace.
In Vietnam, he’d lost one of his arms and both legs in a grenade explosion. He was part of a rescue mission in the village of Khe Sanh.
This sunny afternoon was the 36th anniversary of the 1968 incident. Max and Steve had a ritual they shared over the years. They sanctified the date by getting together and offering hugs.
They did it not only for Max but for all the others who’d come home as haunting reminders of that awful war.
And the memory of that moment came back again when Max Cleland died on Nov. 9, at age 79, after a remarkable life in which he was elected a U.S. senator from Georgia and later headed the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
But the friendship began when they wheeled Max into the hospital unit whose patients dubbed it “The Snake Pit.” Steve Miller was there as a physical therapist. So was Mel Mintz, who later became a councilman from Northwest Baltimore County.
They were there for countless Vietnam-era veterans who not only struggled with physical injuries but emotional trauma — and with a nation that hadn’t yet learned to distinguish the oft-vilified returning warrior from the misguided U.S. war policy.
One night, for example, half a dozen of the “Snake Pit” vets, with their visible wounds and missing limbs, visited a nearby Washington pub. They were asked to leave when nearby patrons found it unsettling to see so many reminders of an unpopular war.
(The incident was slightly rectified a few weeks later. The legendary Baltimore stripper Blaze Starr was informed about it and invited the whole “Snake Pit” gang to her place, the Two O’Clock Club on The Block. She closed the place to the public that night, and she and other ladies entertained the troops in private until the following dawn. It was a rare reprieve from their ordeals.)
“Max was the point man of that whole group of young officers,” Steve Miller recalled. Steve spent much of his career in his native Baltimore, at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
He held tightly to those memories of “The Snake Pit” and the unconquerable veterans who came home as living, stumbling ghosts but eventually emerged ready to get on with their lives.
Max spent 18 months at the hospital. “He never felt sorry for himself,” Miller said. “He wasn’t going to give in. But that whole group of young guys — they brought the war home with them, and had to keep fighting it.”
I went with Steve that day in 2004 when he and Max reunited. At this time, Max was working for the Export-Import Bank of the United States. On his desk, a morning newspaper listed the latest American casualties from the fighting in Iraq.
The number, just getting started, was more than 600.
Near Max was a photograph of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with the names of the dead. The number there was about 58,000.
Max made it home, all right. But the image of him that stays with me is the farewell in his office. “Gimme a hug,” Max said again. But all Max could extend was his one remaining arm.
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