Fortunate Son
Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes
Oh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask 'em, "how much should we give?"
Oh, they only answer, "more, more, more!"—John Fogerty, “Fortunate Son”
My younger half-brother, Ken, recently sent me a few photos of our father, K.C. Howell, who passed away unexpectedly in 1996. I’d seen them all, except for one. The one that was new to me shows Dad standing beside a bunk in what looks like a temporary lodging situation. The location is unknown, but I’d guess it’s an American base in Japan. The year is probably 1967.
According to Ken, he was showing off his new front tooth after having it replaced. He lost it in a tunnel complex in Vietnam during a U.S. counteroffensive operation. An enemy soldier bashed him in the mouth with the butt of a rifle, knocking him unconscious and—as I remember the story—preparing to bayonet him. Dad’s fellow soldier neutralized the threat, saving his life, if not the tooth. So it goes.
K.C. Howell was an Army sentry dog handler who entered enemy tunnels with his dog, a flashlight, and fortunately for him, a fellow soldier watching his back.
I have an earlier photo of him with his dog, Caesar, in a 212th Military Police Company (Sentry Dog) base camp. 212 MP was reactivated in January of 1966 and as far as I can tell immediately deployed to Vietnam.
I was born in May of that year. Based on the notes Dad left on the back of his photos, he served in Sóc Trăng province in the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam, a region known for hundreds of beautiful, centuries-old pagodas and temples.
The 212 MP photo shows the gap in Dad’s smile. He had to wait a while for the Army to arrange the surgery. I’ve had this photo for over 30 years. Thanks to my first wife, Tamara, for organizing and labeling Dad’s photos and labeling them with the handwriting he left on the back of each. He developed the film himself in what must have been fairly austere conditions. Having the tooth replaced “soon” turned out to be a year or two later.
K.C. returned from the war when I was an infant living with my mother in Plant City, Florida. According to the few words I could coax from her about him, he came home as a different person.
They met in the Plant City High School band. Mom played clarinet. Dad played the tuba. Their marriage had survived years of deployment but didn’t last the first year he was back.
And then he was gone—out of my life completely. My mother made a living training racehorses. She met a jockey and remarried a couple years later. We traveled up and down the east coast, from Florida Downs to Green Mountain Park in Vermont, and many horse and harness racing tracks in between.
I was allowed to assume that the stepfather—an abusive reprobate and connoisseur of unlikely get-rich-quick schemes—was my biological father. I’d been called Stevie Davis for the first several years of my life and had no reason to suspect it wasn’t true.
The truth came out when a fifth-grade school teacher in Seffner, Florida, insisted on calling me by the name Howell. I knew that was wrong. Surely they were confusing me (But how?) with my Howell relatives. I was too young to have considered how family relationships and names are related.
I’d been taught to stand up for myself. So I did.
I made such a stink that the teacher sent me to the principal's office. They called my mother and had her take me home to sort it out before I returned. That’s when I learned that I had a “different father,” he was never going to be around, and that’s all I needed to know. On my next day of school, suddenly, my name was Howell.
I believe my mother was simply doing the best she could. She was focused on survival. We were poor, and we lived with a man who was as likely to deal a stinging insult or give us the back of his hand as to say good morning. He’s been dead for about 40 years. Enough said.
Although it was surprising, it wasn’t a terrible thing to be re-labeled. My grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins—people I had always known and loved—were named Howell. Suddenly, I was one of them in a way I’d never considered and still didn’t quite understand. I had questions. But I’d have to wait a few years before I got straight answers. My father had been cut out of my life, probably for good reasons. The secrecy only fed my growing curiosity, but out of what I believe was a concern for my welfare, the subject was off-limits. My Howell relatives knew the non-negotiable rule my mother had laid down not to talk to me about K.C.
The revelation that I wasn't the son of the worst person in my life was a welcome one, but it created more questions than answers—questions I'd later find answers to on my own, against the will of my mother and beneath the notice of an apathetic and mostly absent stepfather.
I remember seeing Dad once when I was very young, in 1970. (Do we think we remember events at such a young age because we’ve seen the photos so many times, or do I actually remember something that happened when I was four years old?) I was visiting my grandmother, Vesta Howell. Dad happened to show up, and Grandma looked the other way. I’m not sure I knew who he was. I liked his dog. I have a couple of photos from that day. Here’s one.
It never happened again, and that makes me think Mom found out and wasn’t happy about it. My mother has never been a person to take lightly.
I didn’t see him again for a decade. I was 14, and I’d spent the previous several weeks thinking things through before conspiring with my aunts, Barbara and Brenda, to track him down and meet him.
The aunts got the message out, and one hot summer day while I was swimming in Aunt Brenda’s pool, Dad showed up. He took me to Dairy Queen for a chili dog, and he talked. He had only good things to say about my mother. He expressed regret for the way he behaved as a younger man and regret that he hadn’t been around for me. He freely admitted that whatever had gone wrong in his marriage to Mom was his fault. I’d learned from someone else that Mom had ordered him to stay away; he wouldn’t have said anything to make it seem he was casting blame on her. Even then, I saw regret in his eyes, and remorse. The details of their breakup remain a mystery to me, and I’m OK with that.
The story of his losing a tooth in the war and having it replaced much later, is part of the gap in my personal knowledge of my father. Seeing that terribly back-lit, barely serviceable "new" photo dropped a missing piece of the puzzle into place—a split-second snapshot of his life. Seeing it for the first time this year was a joyful sort of shock.
In the following years, we saw each other regularly. I met new siblings and a stepmother who welcomed me and treated me like her own. Dad’s greatest love was fishing, and he took me out at the mouth of the Manatee River and surrounding areas to fish for mullet, mackerel, and sheepshead in a flat jon boat with the motor in the center. He taught me where to look for and how to spot a school of fish. He taught me net repair. I learned the names of everything we pulled in, what to keep, what to throw back, and what would draw blood if I wasn’t careful.
Two years later, I inherited a 1976 Volkswagen Superbeatle. With no engine. Dad found a motor, and it became our project to rebuild it and install it in the Bug.
Between car maintenance and fishing trips, we spent time at the now-defunct Clock Restaurant in Palmetto, Florida. Dad always ordered me a big eggs-and-bacon breakfast. He subsisted on coffee and Kool menthols. The waitresses liked him. He was a local deputy with the Manatee County Sheriff’s Department, and everybody knew him. It amazed me that he was so well-known when I, his son, knew almost nothing about him.
I was shy at first and didn’t know what to expect, but we became close quickly, and I thought he was the coolest dude I’d ever met. We spent a lot of time on the water. Once, he grounded us on a sandbar as our boat sank in bad February weather, but that’s a story for another time.
When he got his commercial fishing license in the early ‘80s, I drove down from Gainesville to fish with him and bring in a little money. I was working multiple jobs to pay tuition and survive at the University of Florida, and the fishing money helped me reach graduation without too much debt. It took me almost eight years to earn my degree by alternating attending classes with missed semesters when the money ran out. Some of my relatives made a joke about my having become a professional student. One uncle suggested I be realistic, get a real job, and live a normal life. Dad never stopped encouraging me to drive on and never give up.
My graduation consisted of a Reserve Officer Training Corps commissioning ceremony in which the R.O.T.C. commander swore me in and handed me a ceremonial diploma for the BA in anthropology I’d worked so long to earn. Then we raised our right hands, and he administered the oath of office. While I was sworn in as a shiny new lieutenant, Dad pinned a gold bar on my left shoulder, Mom on my right. It was the first time I’d seen them together in the same space. I think they were as disoriented by that as I was happy to see them talking.
In March of 1995, while serving in a U.S. Army infantry unit based in Colorado Springs, the staff duty sergeant called me to our battalion headquarters’ front desk and handed me a telephone receiver.
It was my step-sister calling from Palmetto, Florida, with the news that Dad had passed away suddenly in his sleep. When I told my boss, he said, “Go home. Stay a week or two. I’ll take care of the emergency leave form.”
I went home. Dad’s wife spread his ashes over the water at the Bradenton Marina. The Manatee River was where he’d always gone to feel at peace, and it’s where he made his last journey out to sea.
I was 30 years old, and I’d known my father for 14 years. That was all I was going to get.
My military career was quite different than my father’s experience, but I suspect he and I both would be surprised at the similarities. The Army probably didn’t change all that much between the Vietnam “Conflict” and the so-called Global War on Terrorism.
I’ve often wished he could be around to swap war stories with me and talk about the differences between his conflict and the ones I took part in. I’d like to believe in an afterlife that includes that possibility. If Heaven exists, he’s there, on salt water in a small boat, and the fish are jumping.
Thanks again for the photos, Ken.