The notice on the door of VFW Post 4417 said the building would be sold at the county tax sale on December 9. Not counting the chaplain, the youngest member who saw it was seventy-one.
Walt Brenner read it from his truck, with the engine running.
He had paid his dues to Post 4417 every January for fifty years. Twenty dollars, then thirty, then forty-five. He mailed the check. He had never once walked through that door.
Pastor Sam Greer knocked on his truck window.
"Meeting's at seven," Sam said. "Emergency. Lloyd asked me to make sure you came."
"I'm not much for meetings."
"I know." Sam didn't move from the window. "I'm the post chaplain, Walt. I've got nineteen men on the list who still pay dues. Fourteen still come. I need every one of them in that room tonight."
Walt looked at the door for a long time.
Then he turned off the engine.
The inside of Post 4417 smelled like old coffee and fried fish and fifty years of cigarette smoke that had soaked into the paneling before anybody ever heard of a smoking ban. There was a long bar, a pool table with a tear in the felt, and a wall of framed photographs. Young men in uniform. Black and white, then faded color.
In the middle of the floor, a bucket caught water from the ceiling. *Plink. Plink. Plink.*
Fourteen men sat in folding chairs. Lloyd Hersh, the post commander, stood at the front. He was seventy-nine, with a cane and an Army cap and a voice that still carried.
"Here's where we are," Lloyd said. He read from a paper. "We owe the county thirty-one thousand dollars in back property taxes. We owe the roofer from last time eight thousand. The furnace is on its last legs. We have four thousand two hundred dollars in the bank."
Nobody said anything.
"We can do another fish fry," somebody offered.
"We did three fish fries," Lloyd said. "We cleared nineteen hundred dollars."
"Sell it to Grady Pruitt," said someone in the back. "Let him make it into apartments. At least we get something."
A few men nodded. Most of them just looked at the floor.
Walt sat in the last chair in the last row. He looked at the photographs on the wall.
Third row, near the end. Two young men in Army uniforms, side by side. Nineteen years old, both of them, and grinning like they had just gotten away with something.
*Pvt. Robert Hersh. 1950 to 1969.*
*Pvt. Edward Sorensen. 1950 to 1970.*
Bobby Hersh was Lloyd's little brother. He and Eddie Sorensen and Walt and two other boys from Pine Hollow had gotten on the same bus to Fort Knox in the spring of 1969.
Three of them came home.
Walt had not said their names out loud in fifty-five years.
"The thing is," Lloyd was saying, "we're just old. That's all. There's nobody coming after us. When we go, this place goes too. Maybe it's time."
The bucket went *plink*.
Sam looked at Walt from across the room. Walt didn't look back.
"Anybody else?" Lloyd asked. "Before we vote?"
The room was quiet.
Walt Brenner had not spoken one word in that building, ever. He had not spoken about Vietnam to anybody, not his friends, not the town, not even the doctors at the VA. He had decided a long time ago that some things are better carried than shared.
He put his hands on his knees.
And for the first time in fifty years, Walt stood up.