Axar.az presents the article “1975” by John Samuel Tieman.

I'm 75 now. The mirror isn't what it used to be. I think I see a wart and wonder cancer for example. I can still remember being not Errol Flynn but just handsome enough for the occasional twenty-something woman to take another look. Today I'm just old. Like when I went to shave this morning. And brush. Then I comb the gray. Then I balance, as I often balance these days, as I await my first old age fall. But on occasion, as I gaze at the old man in the mirror, still I see that young man for just a second, that young man with all the years and adventures and women ahead. Then I shave the old man.

Memories are often what moves me now. Fifty years ago this May, I got my bachelor's degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Sometimes it feels like a few days ago. Sometimes it feels like a few centuries ago. One thing that never changes is my gratitude. Gratitude for the love of friends, for the generosity of teachers. I got my first teacher's certificate along with my degree. So I feel gratitude for my career, my forty-plus years as a teacher. But, perhaps above all other things, I feel a gratitude for that intangible that I can only describe as my intellectual coming of age.

I can just about date the beginning of that intellectual coming of age. Just about name the date. When I was 23, 1973, an undergraduate, depressed, confused, shortly after I came home from that terrible war, Vietnam, shortly after I lost all faith in God, in government, I one day knew what art is. I'd just finished Stendhal's “The Red And The Black”, the story of a young man who fails in the army and in The Church. The main character, Julien Sorel, I felt his failures. I'd lost all my faith in my Catholicism, and we had, in that year, all but lost the war I'd fought in, Vietnam. I went to the student union at SMU, and Roberta Flack's “Killing Me Softly” came on the jukebox. I'd not heard it before. I cannot, indeed I will not, put a definition to this. But there, right there, as I sat alone in a small booth, the novel in my hand, her song in my ear – for the first time, I truly knew what art is. “He sang as if he knew me / In all my dark despair / And then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there / And he just kept on singing / Singing clear and strong / Strumming my pain with his fingers / Singing my life with his words”.

In 1975, Saigon fell. Or, rather for me, that An Khe fell. That's where I served in Vietnam, Camp Radcliff near the village of An Khe. I had no real attachment to Saigon. I was stationed way north of Saigon with the Army's 4^th Infantry Division. In my senior year at SMU, in 1975, the North Vietnamese invaded the South. I knew the South wouldn’t fight. Not that I blamed them. Who wants to be the last man to die? Every evening that April, I watched the TV news. I watched for the map. As the North captured another chunk of the South, that bit of the map was painted red. One evening, An Khe was red. Camp Radcliff fell without a fight. The South Vietnamese Army just ran. Not that I wanted anyone to die. But An Khe fell without a fight. And I wept bitterly. Twice in my life, I have wept like that. The other time was when my father died.

For all that sadness, I sometimes think that the G. I. Bill is one of the best things that ever happened to me. The greatest benefit was the monthly stipend. I could be a full-time student and not work. I got about $250 a month. I paid $90 for rent, maybe as much again for food and such. And with the rest I lived large, LARGE. Of course, the price I paid for the G. I. Bill was a war. Nonetheless, when I think of the G. I. Bill, I get the same smile I get when I think of my college sweetheart.

And life went on. I lived with Debbie Dugan. I almost married Debbie, my college sweetheart. We're still friends. At that time, I'd never had a girlfriend who was so beautiful that other guys would turn to look. Debbie awakened in me feelings of love and tenderness, feelings that Vietnam had truncated. Her kindness, her love, her beauty, I will always be grateful for that.

So 1975. I'd go on to get a master's degree and Ph. D. and a few more certificates and such. But these would be rather businesslike arrangements. But never would it be so sweet, on one hand, and the times so bitter on the other. I wouldn't trade the life I have now for anything. Still, late at night, to borrow from the better poet – Backward, turn backward time in your flight, make me 25 again just for tonight.