With Memorial Day celebrated earlier this week, I’’ve been thinking about my old friend Joe Nawrozki, who got cheated when he came home from his war. Joe never phrased it that way, but I will.
He was one of the thousands who served in Vietnam and came home to a country that gave him the cold shoulder instead of the warm embrace. There were no cheering crowds for Vietnam vets. At best, there was indifference; at worst, there was blame for a hideous war that was out of their control.
When Joe landed at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, in uniform, a woman approached him and asked if he’d just returned from Vietnam. Yes, Joe said, anticipating a scene reminiscent of World War II’s homecoming celebrations. The woman spat at him. The country was still confusing the war with those who fought it because they had no choice.
Joe was a street kid off East Baltimore’s Belair Road and Erdman Avenue. Armed with a high school diploma from City College, he found work at the old News American newspaper before the army called him away.
He went to Vietnam as a soldier, but he also served as a war correspondent. He worked there with lepers. He volunteered to take food and medicine to remote villages. He was ambushed three times.
Later, after he’d returned to work at The News American, he was one of six people honored at the Gerald Ford White House for his service to Vietnam veterans.
Over the years, he wrote a lot about those who served in war. Some of them came home with terrible injuries, and some with emotional damage, and some never made it back.
Joe had to deal with his own demons. In the newsroom one day, with the war still on and the deaths mounting, Joe took a call from a grieving mother. She’d just gotten word that her son had been killed in Vietnam while her family was preparing for his homecoming.
The woman said, “I’m sitting here by the Christmas tree we got for him.”
It was July. She wanted to make it feel like Christmas for her boy.
And Joe got off the phone, and drove his fist into a nearby wall, and then went off by himself and broke down.
There were more than 50,000 American soldiers who never made it home, and thousands more who made it home badly damaged.
Joe once said, “I felt like I had to make those numbers human.”
He wrote for The News American until the paper folded, and then went to The Sun (often teamed with the great Sun reporter Bob Erlandson.) Through many of those years, Joe also taught martial arts classes. He was a fifth-degree master. Among his pupils were students from the Maryland School for the Blind.
He said, “They taught me more than I taught them.”
He taught a lot of us about courage and humility and getting by in tough times. He died in September of 2014, at the age of 70. He got cheated when he came home from his war. But like so many who served, he never gave America less than his best.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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